Things! Stuff!
Usually when I buy a car I spend 3-4 years thinking I should fit extra lights to it. Most of the time I don't get around to it, but on rare occasions I do it happens just before I catch a case of the car fever and sell the car. Now I figured I'd put them on shortly after buying the car instead. A novel idea.
What tools do you need to remove the upper grille on a B8 passat? 1) a Torx T-20 screwdriver and 2) a phone with Youtube on it. Youtube told me to undo four screws, insert eight fingers between the grille slats and give it a firm yank. Success. The only reason I removed the grille was cable routing.
The LED bar mounting bracket is a powdercoated piece of steel that goes behind the license plate. It didn't occur to me to take pics before I put the plate back on. It's also very unnerving to drill self-tapping screws into the bumper of a modern car because you never know what's behind, even if the plate plinth is designed to be drilled into. I could have flipped the bracket the other way and tucked the LED bar further in, but that would have required hacking up the lower grille. Everything I've done is easily reversible, except the screw holes in the plate plinth but that's what it's for after all.
The bumper is full of snow because I had an "Alltrack Moment" this morning. There was a pedestrian in the middle of the street because the sidewalk had half a meter of snow on it. The sidewalk was good enough for me. And yes, the license plate is crooked. This has been rectified.
The LED bar is road legal with all the necessary approvals just like every other light on a car. There's also an "off road only" high power mode with about twice the lumens. To switch to the road legal mode you need to connect +12V to the blue wire as well. If you don't, you're a dirty, dirty criminal. Note how the manufacturer didn't bother to run the blue wire to the watertight Deutsch connector, it's just hanging off the side. I secured it with electrical tape.
Since this is a modern car you can't just tap into the headlight wiring. You *can* tap into the canbus, but that's something I don't want to do if I don't have to. This relay kit is non-destructive, is made in Sweden and costs more than the LED bar itself. It consists of a relay (sorry, PowerUnit®) and a little dongle that plugs into the OBD port under the dashboard. The two communicate over Bluetooth. Yes I know the wiring is a bit messy, but it works. That's earth to the LED bar and relay from the ground point, and +12V via the fuse to the relay from the jump start terminal under the black plastic cover. The battery itself is in the trunk on these cars.
This is the first time I've ever had to run a firmware update after installing lights on a car. Both the PowerUnit™®™™ and the OBD dongle needed new software. What has the world come to?
After running the firmware updates I downloaded the configuration file for my car. At this point the OBD dongle is up and running and knows that the ignition and low beams are on. You then need to tell the "Power Unit" (the relay in the engine bay) what to do with this info.
And the end result. The image quality is a bit poor beacuse it's a still from a short video clip I took. I didn't get around to taking an actual picture.
The car REALLY didn't like when I disconnected the battery to do the wiring. After starting it back up it threw up every warning light and error message in the known universe. The DSG was weird, the power steering was sluggish and all the radars, sensors and driving aids were offline. I've seen this before on other cars, so no worries. Driving around the yard for a bit made all the systems come back to life except the ACC. That required me to turn the car off and back on again.