I have a 2005 Octavia L&K estate with maxidot. A few weeks ago maxidot told me my passenger side brake light bulb was defective so I replaced it and all was fine.

Last night the orange dash bulb warning light came on, with nothing on maxidot telling me which bulb.

I've checked headlights, main beam, front fogs, side lights, front indicators, wingmirror indicators, tail lights, rear indicators, all three brake lights, reversing lights, rear fogs, number plate lights and all seem to be working.

Unless there are meant to be two rear fog lights? Only one side came on; is that how it should be?

Other than that is there anything else I can check and is there any reason why maxidot isn't telling me which bulb this time?

Thanks in advance for any help :-)

Unless it has been enabled by the dealer (or someone with VCDS) you should only have one rear fog light, on the off side.

You could have a bulb on the way out that hasn't actually blown yet. I had an intermittent warning light and found one of the rear lights was sort of smoked and obviously about to blow.

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Worth checking the rear number plate bulb carefully. The contacts can become degraded, usually with screen wash leakage but there may be other causes. In that case the bulb seems to work but the controller might still find fault with it?

Worth checking the rear number plate bulb carefully. The contacts can become degraded, usually with screen wash leakage but there may be other causes. In that case the bulb seems to work but the controller might still find fault with it?

Less likely on the estate as the washer is in the high level brake light and not near the number plate lights.

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Thanks for the replies.

The mystery has now been solved by Maxidot; it is telling me that one of the side light bulbs is out. Sure enough it's now not working, although it was when the generic bulb warning came on. How did it know the bulb was about to go?! Clever car.

The can bus system knows how much resistance and current should be in each circuit and when that isn't there then it assumes a bulb has failed and flashes up a warning.

Ian

The annoying thing is when the car decides a bulbs must have blown so turns off power to said bulb even when it's fine.

I had a bulb error in May for near side front side light so ecu cut power to it. Came back on with a restart and not caused a problem since. Sometimes these things are just one off glitches. Oh and on that occasion maxi dot couldn't tell me which bulb it was but due to ecu cutting power it was easy to work out.