MR2 Owners Club

Hi all, one of my headlights has stopped popping up. For a while it would intermittently work, but now it no longer moves at all (drivers side). I disconnected both motor units, and I've tested the drivers side motor on the nearside, and the motor unit works fine, so it's not that. I've tested the connectors to ground and that's fine, but I don't really know what I'm doing beyond that (I have a multi-meter). Any ideas? Thanks

Maybe worth checking the connector at the blue controller box in the frunk. If they ok open it up and check the circuit board. Not sure if there will be board mounted relays in there but I know there are capacitors to drive the up/down function. In the ky2 section or somewhere on this site is a how to on replacing these capacitors to reduce the time lag. It was written by trevsmr2 if that helps the search.

Thanks for the tip. I've isolated the problem to a broken connection between pin 5 of the blue box connector and pin 2 of the motor connector, the green wire. I'd guess it's extremely unlikely the wire itself would fail, so I'm assuming it's the contact in one of the two connectors. I guess the only option is to strip away a bit of wire insulation to verify which one.

So you have put a meter across both ends of this green wire and got no continuity?

Wires can get chafed in all parts of the loom esp when they are this old and fixing points for the looms may have been messed with.

I got a Saab and an absolute wire breaking at a point on the chassis where it is zip tied is a common problem.

Oh and you can use a couple of drawing pins as spikes to pierce the wire sheath to meter it.

Thanks for that tip! Just verified that it's definitely the connector that's gone bad, I guess moisture has found its way inside. There's continuity between the relay box and the wire immediately behind the connector, but nothing to the contact in the connector itself.

Easy fix then. Drill hole in casing and solder jumper wire to the board where the connector for green wire is then solder other end to green wire. You could put a bullet connector in the jumper line if you think you may need to disconnect in the future.