saabin

Had I had a scare on Friday morning as I was heading out to go watch a friend at the Texas Invitational..

First, a little background info.. we have had a very wet & rainy May here in TX, so I haven’t driven the car much for the past 2 months.. needless to say I forgot to plug the trickle charger in the last time I moved the car out of the garage, so the battery was feeling kinda weak when starting the car. I had put the car on a 6 AMP battery charger the night before, and left it on for about 4 hours. Because of doing this, the frunk was open and the frunk light was on for a while (I think it shuts itself off after 30 minutes or so even if the frunk is still open.)

Back to Friday morning.. I pop the frunk to put my bag in and almost immediately I noticed smoke coming from the cowling/vents near the master cylinder. At first I thought, no way that came from there..and then the smell hit me.. ugh, the nasty smell of electronics burning.. Holy crap, I think, and I go run get my wrench to disconnect the battery..

The smoke continues, and I have visions in my head of fried wiring harnesses on my turbo and many $$ later to fix..

I get the battery disconnected, but the smoke has subsided before I get it fully disconnected.

My mind is racing on what the heck could be burning? There was a lot of magic smoke let out of the wires in there..

I pop the cover over the master cylinder and look around.. I don’t see anything amiss.. I then pop out the frunk light housing and see the culprit..

Needless to say, I’ve never seen one of these die in that fashion before.. I guess there’s something to be said for the failure mode of the good old fashioned bulbs.. The amount of smoke was impressive.. thankfully it wasn't anything more serious.

I bought the full LED interior “kit” from Suncoast and have had them in the car for almost 2 years..

Quadcammer

wow, thats a pretty crap looking LED.

SJP3003

I noticed something similar had happened to the conventional bulb in the engine compartment of my car (in the fan housing) before I bought it, melting some of the surrounding housing, and have had an LED in there since then (yikes!).

gvcap10

Yikes!!!!