So I was puttering down the highway, it was nighttime and my headlights were on, all of the sudden all of the lights that light up the tach, climate control, audio controls, etc all went off, like I had turned the the headlights off, it even went back to full brightness.

The tach and speedo still worked fine, it was exactly like I had turned the headlights off, but I didn't touch them and the headlights didn't flicker a bit.

Any ideas of what could've happened?

I thought fuse at first, but it seems like that fuse is fine.

 

Ok, so it seemed I was looking at the wrong fuse.



I originally looked at fuse #5, which was fine, I found out that fuse #23 was the faulty one and that was popped.

I replaced it with another 10A mini-blade fuse and it immediately popped when I cut the headlights on.

Any ideas where to start the troubleshooting?

The only electrical work I've done was replace the head unit with an aftermarket unit.

 

How recently did you put in an HU? Might have something to do with the wiring for dimming the HU that is causing a problem with the dash dimming (linked to each other so that when the headlights turn on and the dash dims so does the HU).

 

I put it in about 2 months ago, everything has been working fine too. When I installed the head unit, I never bothered hooking up the dimmer to the head unit.

I think I'll just start with the parking lights and start troubleshooting there, this could be a big pain.