I purchased some white LED sidemarker lights to replace the stock bulbs on m 06 a6.I put them in yesterday and they work fine and theres no problems with them coming on or anything. my problem is that the car is telling my now that the blbs are out but they clearly arent, ive tested them over and over. I know that its because of the LED's but I dont know why.. can someone help me understand this?

As for right now im replacing them with my stock bulbs until I can figure out whats going on.

 

your car uses voltage to determine if a bulb is working or not. So when you replace a bulb with a lower wattage, the car thinks that since it does not draw as much as it is suppose to, it must be burnt out. The only solution I know of is to add resistors to each led bulb to draw the same amount of current as the original.

hope that makes sense.

 

Yep... which really defeats the purpose of LEDs for anything other than looks...

 

yea that sucks.... i contacted the person i purchased them from and they are sending me a set of white xenon's to put in there instead of the LEDs. all i really want is it to be white so i dont mind using norma bulbs rather than LED's.... if anyone wants the LED's send me a message im sure we can work something out....

 

That's exactly the problem. I think I would forget about those but if your determined to use them then try to figure out what size they are and how many are in there.

so you need to know;
Your current voltage (not 12V) you have 14 Volts. You need to find out what the Bulbs are using.
LED voltage drop (probably. 3.3?)
LED current rating (25?)
how many LEDS (2?)

So in this case you would need a 300 ohm resistor in the power line before or after the LED's to help suck up some more electricity. You are trying to use up the 14V of electric on the line. If you had 3) 3.3V/25mA LED's you would need a 100ohm. --Radio shack.

You can screw around with the Calc's here;

www.ledcalculator.net

 

ohh no im not determined for anything lol... i just wanted white bulbs and thought leds would be nice. with that said I have a pair of white halogen replacements on the way which should clear up the problem. thanks for the help though i learnt something new today.