Hi guys,
This is my first post, so please be gentle.
The DRL idiot light has started to blink in my wife's 1995 Cavalier. This is especially wierd, because the car is not equipped with DRL's. Even the manual says "Canada cars only". What on earth could be the problem? How can I verify what the problem is?
Is one of the bright headlights burned out?
i find it amusing that SHOoff has nothing better to do but follow me around & be an unhelpful dick in even cross-forum. - Jon Mick
No, the headlights all light up to full brightness. Last week I did find the ground tab broken on the battery tray. I ran a new ground wire from the engine block grounding stud to the most convenient body grounding spot I could find- one of the nuts for the strut tower. Would this be insufficient for the DRL/lights for some reason?
Update:
I took some time off today to work on the car. I wire brushed the battery tray where the ground cable connects and somehow found some pretty solid steel. I drilled out the old broken bolt and tapped the hole for a slightly larger SAE bolt and re-attached the ground cable connection. I left the heavy ground cable that I attached last week in place for a redundant ground.
With the battery reconnected, there was no change- once the car is in gear, the DRL dash cluster warning light still comes on and blinks. I rechecked the low and high beam lights and all are functioning normally.
This certainly is annoying! What is left to check?
I looked through the FSM and this is kinda weird. I would try swapping the cluster and see if that solves the problem.
and maybe check if the drl relay is shot. If you have one, it should be behind the impact bar. I know I don't have DRL on my car, but who knows.. maybe it is all there and just disabled somehow. Idunno. I am going to screw around with my car and see what happens. lol. Maybe I can figure something out. 1995 was an interestingly weird first year for this generation j-body. lol. I will try and get you an answer or a solution later in the afternoon.
I crawled under the nose this morning to check, and there is no sign of a relay on the crash guard. I can see the bundled cable all the way across, and there is not "break out" of it for a relay anywhere from one side to the other. I didn't have a camera handy, but it was pretty easy to access from underneath between the mounts for the crash guard on either side of the car.
yeah, I too don't have anything like that. I guess it is for 1996 and up. I tried to get something and I only have a drl fuse in the dash fuse box, but even if I pull it out... nothing happens. lol.
Douglas Staley wrote:Update:
I took some time off today to work on the car. I wire brushed the battery tray where the ground cable connects and somehow found some pretty solid steel. I drilled out the old broken bolt and tapped the hole for a slightly larger SAE bolt and re-attached the ground cable connection. I left the heavy ground cable that I attached last week in place for a redundant ground.
With the battery reconnected, there was no change- once the car is in gear, the DRL dash cluster warning light still comes on and blinks. I rechecked the low and high beam lights and all are functioning normally.
This certainly is annoying! What is left to check?
That is really odd. But if nothing is working incorrectly, I have a suggestion.
If you take the cluster out (instructions are on here somewhere) you can take the glass off the front. Then take out the little side piece where the DRL indicator is. Put a little piece of electric tape on the back side, and put it all back together. You'll never see the light again. I switched to an Auto cluster in mine and had to do this because the LOW TRAC light on the auto is in the same place as the upshift light on the manual.
i find it amusing that SHOoff has nothing better to do but follow me around & be an unhelpful dick in even cross-forum. - Jon Mick
or, you could cut out the LED.. it's lighter that way. lol
- Your not-so-local, untrained, uncertified, backyard mechanic. But my @!#$ runs
im having the same problem iv searched and tinkered but im stumped
My 97 sunfire and 00 cavalier both had that happen and there was corroded wires in the harness that runs under the radiator in the factory splice. Everything worked fine for a couple of weeks and then I had a dim headlight, started looking through the harness and found a green spot, cut it out soldered and heat shrunk in new and the light stopped flashing.
