I have a 01 Civic EX that the dash lights stoped working. The odometer lights up and i can dim that. My CD player will dim like it is supposed to when I turn the lights on. The blinker lights stay on the whole time that the headlights are turned on, and do blink with the turn signals. I checked all fuses in the car and under the hood. I took apart the dash to see if I could see a loose connection somewhere, with no luck. Everything looks good. The rear defrost dont work either, the light comes on but it dont work. But here is the weird part... there was a couple times that all the lights worked and the rear defrost worked when I hit a hard bump. But I cant seem to find the where the loose connection is. I am thinking it is a loose gound but I do not know where that grounds to.

Please help!
Any Ideas ??
Thanks:banghead:

Its refreshing and annoying all at the same time to see that there is another person out there suffering from the same problem. My girlfriend just bought a 2001 civic lx coupe AT used and it needed a few things. i just finished installing an aftermarket cd player and this same thing happened to me...weird thing was it needed a AT Trans shift indicator light which i replaced and turned on the key to make sure it worked, which it did, then after finishing the cd player install none of the dash lights worked except the odometer and shift indicator on the dash (not in the console where i replaced it and it worked).

i was just checking fuses and they seemed fine i was hoping it was something i was overlooking but now after reading this i dont know what to do...did you ever have any success with your EX?

please...anyone with help would be greatly appreciated...i really dont want to have to pay honda service money to poke around and try to fix it.

Its refreshing and annoying all at the same time to see that there is another person out there suffering from the same problem. My girlfriend just bought a 2001 civic lx coupe AT used and it needed a few things. i just finished installing an aftermarket cd player and this same thing happened to me...weird thing was it needed a AT Trans shift indicator light which i replaced and turned on the key to make sure it worked, which it did, then after finishing the cd player install none of the dash lights worked except the odometer and shift indicator on the dash (not in the console where i replaced it and it worked).

i was just checking fuses and they seemed fine i was hoping it was something i was overlooking but now after reading this i dont know what to do...did you ever have any success with your EX?

please...anyone with help would be greatly appreciated...i really dont want to have to pay honda service money to poke around and try to fix it.


You need to go back and take all the connections made to the "illumination" wiring loose and isolate them, if you feel brave try to figure them out. BUT... If you are not careful you will burn out the circuit for dimming that is contained in the instrument cluster.

Yeah...there was a wire crossed and it was already too late. As soon as the dash lights were turned on the circuit was fried and we have since replaced the gauge cluster. Costly mistake but at least we got it figured out and everything is working normally again. Thanks for the input though, everyone here is really helpful.

-XS