OK so my car almost caught fire last night. For you to better understand and help me here is the whole story. It all started with a noise from my passenger front headlight. It makes a clicking noise even when the car is off. Then my head lights only came up and down when they wanted to. Now they dont come up or go down at all. (Had to manually turn up and down.) Now for the weird part. Last night I was in the car and it was off but I was listening to music. Well all of a sudden my lights came on and tons of smoke started to come out from under that passenger front headlight. I was unable to determine where exactly it was being created from due to the smoke and visability. I have unplug both headlights and the smoking quit. You can tell though that it was an electrical fire about to start b/c of the smell. (Hopefully everyone is still with me) After I unplug the headlights and made sure everything was off the chiming noise to let you know the lights were still on was going off. The keys were out of the car and still going off. If any one has any clue on what this could be please let me know ASAP! I cannot run the headlights or I know for sure the car will make a nice fire. Thanks in advance for any help.

I have heard that all of this could be caused from the front headlight grounds. I am going to clean all of them just in case. Let me know what you think of this. Thanks again then.

Charley

 

If it were me I would disconnect the battery until I had some definate information or at least until I pulled the fuses to things in that area. This could cost you a car.

 

my guess is the motor is smoking due to a failed control module, assuming a C5 has one.

I just had an issue like this on my C4. Headlight motor melted!
Grease was burnt off, plastic **** to turn the motor by hand litarally melted off the metal spindle and was laying on the garage floor.

Put in a new motor, and it didn’t work. Control module was fried, so I had to put in a new module too.

 

chiming w/ keys rem'd and lights on is normal

 

Not quite sure what the rem'd means but the keys are not in the car and the lights are off. It has never chimed before like this until last night. With the keys out of the ignition and the lights off, it should not chime. So this is not normal.

 

rem'd is removed.

Sounds like the car disagrees. It thinks the lights are on!

 

The chime is determined from the BCM - it thinks the headlights are ON even though they're not.

I agree with the comment that the smoke was likely from the headlight motor.

Here's what I know. The headlight control module under the passenger headlight provides power to the headlight motors to raise and lower them. The control module detects when the headlight is full open or closed by a current feedback when the motor arm hits a stop, i.e. the current momentarily increases when it hits the stop, which the control module detects to stop applying power to the motors. If the control module fails, it could continue applying power to the motors and result in them overheating which could lead to the smoke you saw (or the module itself melting).

Replacing the control module would likely fix that, but now the problem with the chime is still an issue. That chime should be controlled by the headlight switch input to the BCM.

Try this. Manually raise the passenger headlight and remove the black bezel. Under the headlight on front of the wheel well wall you'll see the control module with 2 connectors - one on each side. Unplug both connectors - this will prevent the automatic raising and lowering of headlights (manually raise them) but you can still turn them on/off. That will disconnect the control module from the car altogether and see if the BCM still chimes. If it does then the BCM thinks the lights are still on, so the problem is either the switch (if the lights are OFF then this is not it) or the BCM input for the light circuit may unfortunately be toast.

 

Glad you had some quick thinking

 

Thanks for all of the great info. The car is now in the shop getting looked over and to replace all the electrical wire that burned up. Just as an update though, the chimming noise went away on its own. Really weird and as far as the lights go well...everything seems to work (Except for them going up and down still). Once again thank you.

Charley