Can’t renew Sidelight with Active Bending Lights

[matk]

Hi all,

I have a 2009 V50 with Xenons fitted with the Active Bending Lights. The sidelight (vertical strip) in the drivers side headlamp unit isn’t lighting up.

Just spent the afternoon examining the insides of the unit trying to understand where the bulb is and trawling through threads on here. After getting more and more frustrated at not seeing anything I decided to check the Owners Manual just in case. To my amazement it specifically states on page 227 that this bulb can’t be replaced on Active Bending Lights.

What on earth do Volvo expect you to do if the light fails??? They can’t surely expect you to buy a complete new light unit?

I’m also getting a headlamp fault message on the dash. The Active Bending Lights aren’t bending and there’s a flashing indicator on the light switch at that selector position. Could this or indeed the sidelight failure be triggering the dash message?

[LizardOfBodom]

I may be wrong but it does ring the bell than on ABL models the sidelight was a LED unit so its integrated into lamp as non-replaceble unit. Someone may correct me, but if so - you will need a skilled electronic guy to replace it on the circuit board.
Not sure if that can caue ABL issue though, was it working before / ever worked?
Vida would give you a lot of answers, if you can get access to it.

[matk]

Hi thanks for that. When I got the car I didn't realise it had active bending lights. When I discovered it did I selected on the dash and tried them. They worked on the first corner (left hand turn) but then on the next turn (right hand turn) they failed and I got the error message and they haven't worked since. Also when I got the car the RH Headlight was swimming in water and the unit had sealant all over the joins, clearly someone previous has had issues. I dried the unit out and have had no further issues with water or condensation. Maybe some water in the unit has fried something.

You're right I'll have to get some codes and start looking further. At the moment it doesn't actually bother me, but thinking ahead if I want to sell or get to MOT time I don't know if the error will cause me problems.

[LizardOfBodom]

Yep, highly possible prev owner didnt have them on because of the same problem, when you turned that option ON car detected there is still an ongoing issue and disabled it with warning. The sidelight might be the additional casuality of water ingress but I doubt it is the case of ABL problem.
regardless - there are few YT videos on how to get to sidelight bulb on FL cars, just have a look and see if its reelly inaccesisble?
totally btw - you know the whole lamp can be taken out in like 4 seconds, you pull the peg out and take lamp home with you to inspec properly.
just checking, suprisingly high amount of ppl are not aware :}

[T5R92011]

Never seen the inside of an ABL on an S40, but would assume you can remove the whole inner projector assembly similar to that of a regular Halogen one.

What I can tell you is that when the LED brake light went dim on one side of my facelift S40, it required a new part soldering onto the circuit board... and there was NO warning from dashboard that it wasn't working... so I wasnt very impressed with that.