Self Leveling Headlight Fail

5402 Views 2 Replies 2 Participants Last post by dweixl, Dec 3, 2018

dweixl

Discussion Starter · Nov 30, 2018

I have a 2009 (Canadian version) Forester equipped with factory self leveling headlights. The self leveling feature has stopped working with both of the headlight assemblies now stuck in the low position. Both front and back sensor assemblies seem to be intact.

I have not found much information online regarding this problem except that fixing it can be very expensive.

I have considered using a hack by cutting the wires to the headlight leveling motors and connecting a variable 12 volt power supply to raise the headlight assemblies back up to a neutral position.

Any thoughts / experience on this subject?

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infinite012

· #2 · Nov 30, 2018

The leveling motors may have burnt out or maybe there's a fuse that needs to be replaced. In any case, you can completely bypass the leveling motors by simply disconnecting the wire harness from the motors at the back of each headlight. Then you can manually adjust the headlights using the adjustment mechanism. You might have an error on your dash come up due to the "missing" (disconnected) leveling motors.

I have a spare set of leveling motors out of a pair of BRZ headlights that I wanted to retrofit into my Forester retrofit project, but never got around to it.

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dweixl

Discussion Starter · #3 · Dec 3, 2018

Headlight Leveling Fail Follow Up

I was able to raise both headlight assemblies to the proper height using a 8mm socket on the white nylon adjusting screw. It took about 100 120 degree turns each! Earlier I had given up using that approach as I was expecting movement after 1 or 2 turns.

My guess is that when the airbags were replaced a month ago, the computer reset wasn't done properly and put the lights to their "home" position. So far the lights have stayed up.....

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