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Old April 4th 2013, 18:12
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Steve C Steve C is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Hi

That's all very interesting, I've also saved it for future reference as well. The Germans always do things logically, unlike the Japanese who change the colour of the same wire.

This was an article in our car club magazine about wire colours

Showing Your Colours.

There is definite common sense a certain purity in the colour used by Volkswagen and Audi for their wiring. While other manufacturers have their own codes unlike any other makers', which may differ from model to model within the same model, and even an the same car [I once came across a wire in a Japanese car which changed colour three times as it went through connectors]. VW/Audi colours have been the same for the basic functions since the 1940s, and also match those of other German manufacturers to a certain extent.

Starting at the source of power, the battery: a permanently live source, i.e. a "hot" wire, is red in colour. This is somewhat of an international, but by no means universal standard. The connection between "red" and "hot" are obvious. You must have noticed that any wire attached to the care chassis, to "earth", is brown in colour. Another natural connection earth is, after all, brown.

High-beam headlights are bright in colour; therefore, logically, the wires leading to them should be white. Low-beam is less bright, a little dimmer, yellow to be precise Parking lights are only a shade of their big brothers, hence the grey wires providing current.

There is no obvious colour for wiring associated with the ignition circuit. VW/Audi uses black, with an assortment of traces to distinguish various consumers of current. More about traces later.

Any warning light wire has blue as its basic colour. Pure blue feeds the warning light virtually every car has the charge warning light. Others are blue with various traces.

Green with its associated traces has, since the advent of water-cooled VWs, become associated with all to do with windscreen wipers.

A trace on a wire used to mean in the Beetle days that the wire had been through a switch of some kind. Therefore red/black goes to the starter solenoid. But somewhere along the line it also came to mean an unswitched supply to a particular consumer. For example, on Golfs a red wire with a grey trace, permanently live, goes to the cigarette lighter. Some designer obviously had a sense of humour here, as grey is the colour of cigarette ash!

Black/red goes to the brake lights [because of red lenses?] Black/blue is for reversing lights. Black/yellow comes from the so-called "X" contact - the one which makes the headlights go out when you start the engine. Black/white goes to the left blinkers, black/green to the right. So logically, which colours are used for the wire between the blinker relay and the blinker switch before the current is split up to either side? Black/white/!green, of course, the only wire on any VW/Audi with two differently coloured traces.

Brown with a trace means that there is a switch to earth. So the wire between the interior light and the door switch, which is earthed, is brown with a white trace [white signifying light].

How do you tell the wires leading to the right-ride high and low-beam headlights? They both have a black trace.

Grey, basically for parking lights, has a variety of colourful traces. Grey/black is for the left side parkers and tail-lights; grey/red for the right side; grey/blue in generally for dash lights; grey/green for the number plate light on cars with the split parking-light system [one side parker/tail-light on with the blinker arm); grey/white for the feed to the fog lights [fog is white, you know); and grey/yellow for the rear fog lights [not as bright as front fog-lights].

Blue/green on Beetles means the oil pressure warning light. Of course early Beetles had a green warning light! Newer cars now have blue/black. Blue/white is the hi beam warning light white for the high-beam, naturally. Blue/red means the blinker warning light. Blue/brown is for the brake/handbrake warning light.

Pure green was used on early Beetles for the supply to the wipers and on later models for the self parking facility. Golfs took this steps further. Green/black and green/yellow also go to the wiper motor; green/red to the windscreen-washer pump and green/white to any rear washer pump.

With the increase in equipment added to modern cars - air conditioning, cruise control, fuel injection etc., the consistency of colours was inevitably lost in duplication and a whole lot of apparently illogical colour choices So yellow is now used for the dynamic oil pressure warnings as well as for low beam. The fuel gauge sender now has a violet/ wire. [OK, so the Beetle's brown illogical too.]

But, I ask you, what other cars such evidence of natural, human influences shining through in a feature as mundane as their wires Another reason why VWs and Audis are special, I think.

Rod Young
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