Hi all. This may well be an old chestnut. I have a 2009 facelift Octavia with Xenon headlights. As I start the car, they go thorough the usual self-levelling tests, then right at the end, the left hand headlight doesn't rise up to the correct level. As a result, I have a beautiful illumination of the road 6 feet in front of me. I put the car into the garage today, and they plugged it into VCDS. There are apparently no error messages at all. I am starting to think I am answering my own question here, but is it a case of throw it at the main dealer, and pop off to get a second mortgage? Anyone got an idea why only one light doesn't come up?

Sounds like there might be damage inside the headlight, probably the link between the headlight motor and xenon projector.

 

Did the garage perform any output tests to make sure the headlight has a full range of motion?

Sorry, yes. I should have said. With the VCDS plugged in, it has a full range of movements.

I had similar last winter on the drivers side, would do the side to side dance but not up and down. VCDS showed it had full range of movement and once I’d done that a couple of times it seemed to work ok.

 

dealer suggested that as it had happened after setting off with a very heavy load that it had perhaps just gone out of range in trying to self level and got stuck! 

I had something similar with my Scout. I found that somewhere in VCDS there was a reset option which did the trick. Having sold my VCDS, I can't do a screen-shot.