When I turn on my parking lights, the headlights raise, but do not turn on. The only light issue I know I have is that the gear on the passenger side needs to be replaced.

Any ideas on what may be going on here?

 

Anyone? This is driving me

 

You'll probably find that once you replace the gear the problem will go away. I've heard of many examples where the new gear fixed it.

 

well known symptom of the headlight gears starting to wear out. something about the headlight doors not stopping where the control module thinks they are/should be confuses it and causes it to open them.

there are two wires into the control module that control the headlight door position. there an "open" wire and a "close" wire. the close wire gets 12V whenever the headlight switch is in the off position, causing the door to close or stay closed. the open wire is 12V when the switch is in the headlights position causing them to open or stay open. in the parking lights only position both the open and close wires are off, the doors are supposed to stay where they are (off--> parking lights: doors stay closed, headlights --> parking lights, doors stay open)
when the gears go bad something gets messed up in the module so that when the close wire turns off, it accidentally triggers the doors to open even though they should stay closed in that case. I don't understand why that is, but its well known to be connected to the gears.

replace them and you should be fine!

a word of warning though, I still experienced that problem after replacing my gears...no clue why. for a week or two after replacing with brass I still had the lights open for no reason. no one on the forum had ever seen it before. then suddenly the problem went away and its been a couple years without issue.

 

Thanks for the replies! It looks like I need to get the gear fixed so it won't keep driving me crazy. Hopefully this will put an end to the problem.

 

if you like driving around with just the parking lights on I found when this started happening to me that if you twist the headlight control towards the off state about half way the headlights will go back down without turning the parking lights off, just in case the headlights try to pop up again when you try to correct them. sometimes mine would stay down the second time but other times they wouldn't, this little trick would get them back down without having them pop back up every time though.

 

I had the same issue. The problem went away as soon as I changed to a new brass gear. Hope this helps.

 

See the C5 Sticky (if you haven't already). Good writeup on the fix.