I'm curious if anyone's ever rewired their official MINI driving lights. As they're installed and wired now, they only work with the high beams on. I'd like to use them at any time without the high beams. I've got the installation guide with the wiring diagram as well as the Bentley manual. It doesn't look like it'd be much to wire it up (I'm an aircraft electrician by trade). Any thoughts? Wingnut
Driving lights wired with the high beams are the way I wired mine. No worries about blinding other drivers, dip the high beams & the driving lights are off too. I'm sure you can disconnect the factory wiring & put your own harness in to work as you wish. I used a Hella wiring diagram for mine.
It's easy to wire them to work independently, but kinda a bad idea. Real driving lights are long range spot lights. Great on a dark road, but utterly dazzling for oncoming traffic. Unless you're doing this for a photo op, it's pretty convenient for driving lights to turn off when you swap from high beam to low. The OEM driving light harness is truly top rate. There's a nice looking momentary contact pushbutton that's illuminated in a matching color to other interior lighting with an LED indicator. The OEM driving lights are kinda pitiful. A nice set of Hella or Cibie driving lights will put out about twice the usable light for the same wattage.
Look at the wiring diagram on page 16: http://www.motoringfile.com/howto/Driving_Lights_902.pdf There is a High Beam Signal running to the Auxiliary Driving Light Relay. If you tie that relay input to high, you should be able to turn it on at any time. That said, under what conditions would you want to turn them on without high beams? They are like an extra set of high beams, and in traffic could cause the same type of glare.
I'm looking at it more as an esthetic look, not to drive around blinding everyone. That and it kinda bugged me at first that they only worked with the high beams. And to see if I could do it. Oh, the instructions on Motoring File are dated 2002, and the ones on Out Motoring are dated 2007. I got the current ones dated 6/2012 from my dealer.
Sorry, I didn't realize that this thread is in the 2nd gen section. In the wiring diagram on page 14 here: http://motoringfile.com/files/R56_aux_lights.PDF Pin 4 on connector X14250 of the Footwell Module (A4011) is the high beam signal. It connects to Pin 4 on the 9-pin relay socket SW. Tie that pin to a high signal. I got the information that the pin is the high beam signal from a BMW WDS wiring diagram.