Well, I happened to be in pep boys today...and I happened to run across some decent and small-sized fog lights. They were only like 20 bucks, and me being a 19 year old broke college student with no current job...20 dollars to have working fog lamps again seems more feasable than wasting almost 200 to replace both at the dealer (not including labor).

Anyways, I bought them earlier this afternoon and just finished installing them about an hour ago. This has been the first time ever I've played around with hooking up anything electrical wiring on a car, and I was really happy that I was able to route all the wires and have all my grounds working. They came with some mounting brackets and I mounted them right inside the 2 end recesses in the lower air dam. They look pretty decent and not ricey at all.

The other thing I did was remove my broken fog lamp housings. I don't have or own the torq flex tools that half of this car uses, , so embarrassingly I took a small piece of a saw blade and sawed off the plastic ears (I didn't damage anything though, the ears just need to be unscrewed). I also had a scrap sheet of carbon fiber leftover from another project I'm doing on my 1967 GTO, and I made up some really nice looking block off plates that cover up where the orignal fog housings were behind the front bumper. I tried to really reinforce it with some exterior molding adhesive tape I got at autozone. I drove it tonight to test out the lights and it was still on, so hopefully when I get on the highway the pieces covering up the holes don't fly off [:@]

Anyways, back to the main point and question of this thread! For now I have the new fog lamps hooked up with the provided wiring harness it came with. It works ok, but I ran into a NASTY snag of the harness not being long enough to enter into the interior to hook up the dash switch it came with. I can use the lights, but I have to get out of the car, pop the hood, turn on the switch in the engine compartment because the wires are too short to route into the cabin, shut the hood, and get back inside. Now this setup I have now is obviously not going to work. I did it this way tonight so I could do a road test, but no way am I going to put up with that when I need them on! An idea popped up into my head when I was buttoning everything up, looking at the original harness and the hookups for the fog lamp bulbs, it only is hooked up by 2 wires. I am assuming these are your standard positive and ground. The fog lamps also have the same, pos. and ground. Can I hook up the original wiring to the new lamps so I can bypass the rinky dink harness it came with altogether and use the factory fog lamp buttons in the car? This would look a LOT better. and I'd hopefully be able to bypass all the wiring I had to do under the hood. If so, which wires are the positive and negative? They are colored other than black and red, so I am not sure.

Sorry about the long post, but I hope that helps give you an idea of my dilema!

 

Well, with your current setup the way it is, you could just lengthen the wires to your existing switch so that it can be mounted in your dash.

If you use the existing wiring, it probably won't work. The reason is because even when you install the factory OEM fog lights, you also have to install a fuse, relay, switch button on the headlamp switch, etc. (all of these parts come with the factory fog light kit). Then you have to get the software downloaded and programmed at the dealer. The lights will not work without the software.

So the easiest method for now is to extend the wires from your existing switch, pass them through the firewall under your dash and mount the switch somewhere in that area.

 

okay.

This is my only trouble though. Sort of the other reason why I hooked it up in the engine compartment for now is because I looked and looked, and I cant find an accessible plug or hole to route the wiring into the interior!

I found one place that might work where the interior wiring harness comes through the firewall, but the only problem is from the engine compartment it's impossible to route anything with the hard lines coming from the brakes and all the other hoses. I tried getting my hand back there, no luck. And the other trouble is I can see where it is coming in from the cabin, but not from the engine bay. Are there any other areas where I could slip the wires through?

And I dunno, mabye I wasn't specific enough on the original wiring thing. What I want to do is just reroute the 2 wires that went to the bulb housing, clip them, hook them up to the new fog lamps, and be able to turn them on and off with the 2 fog lamp on/off buttons I already have in the cabin. That doesn't seem like it wouldn't work, I mean because in theory I'm just basically giving power to the lights as if I were just replacing a broken bulb??? I'm not talking about altering or changing the wiring harness or how you turn on/off the outside fog lamps, just transferring those over so it would work as if the originals were still there. Know what I'm saying?

 

Just like with car audio, you would more than likely have to drill a hole through the firewall. I would highly recommend that you leave this one to the pro's unless you are comfortable enough with doing this on your own. This would enable you to get the wiring through.

As far as trying to run your power for the fog lights inline with your existing stock lighitng, I would avoid this. With as many computers as these cars have, you could inadvertantly jack up your car. "Tech" may be able to tell you if there is an accesable remote wire you could top into so that the lights would come on and off the same as the headlights, but I'm not familiar enough with the wiring of the car to tell you how this could be accomplished, if at all.

Keep us posted!!!

 

Well, I got the lights to work inside the car by lengthening the wires and routing them through inside the fender and tucked behind the joor jamb. It's not the prettiest but you only see 3 wires if the door is all the way open, and I did my best to conceal them.

There's only one problem now. There is this switch that came with the fog lamp kit. from inside the car, it works fine.....but the switch I guess has an LED light that is ANNOYINGLY bright inside the cabin at night!!!!. I drove the car for 20 mintues with them on and I couldn't take it anymore. I disconnected the the plugs I wired into the switch for now because the light was so terribly distracting while I was driving. Having fog lamps if nice, but the red blinding light switch in a dark interior looked tacky and wayyyyy out of place! I turned it off happily.

Sice I am working on another car also, I have some spare switches I bought at radioshack, and they don't have lights...but the dumb thing is that if I use any switch other than the one that came with the kit, the built in fuse box that is part of the fog lamp wiring harness keeps blowing fuses! I have gone through 3 fuses so far now, and the fuse that it requires is blue, which I think interprets into a 5 amp limit.

Ideas? Still want this to work, but just a switch that won't overload the wiring and NOT lighted.

I don't know if this helps at all but the switch is a 3 prong....I'm not 100 percent sure what that interprets to in looking for another. Also keep in mind that anything past 5 amps blows the fuse.

 

Three prong should indicate Power, Ground and Remote wires.

There should be switches available that will help regulate the power, which should save your fuses. I couldn't tell you right off the top of my head, but if you look around at department stores and auto stores you should be able to come up with a viable solution!

 

If I understand your story correctly....your car came with factory fog lights that worked at one point.....until they got busted by rocks like mine have.

Instead of paying Volvo $100 per fog light for OEM lights, you bought some $20 after market lights at the auto parts store.

If this is the case, then you should just be able to take the connectors that ran to the original fog lights, and get a wire clip that clips onto the wire without cutting into it, and run that to your new fog lights.....there are two wires for each factory fog light. One is + 12V, one is ground.

Just hook those wires up to your new fog lights, and then the fog light switch should work just fine.

You probably want to make sure the wattage of the aftermarket lamps is close to what the stock fog lamps were, but besides that, you should be fine.

 

So did we establish if it is doable to install aftermarket fog lights in the lower slots on the S80?