So most euro cars from the early 2000's and almost all new cars has this cool feature, you half tap or soft tap the left or right indicator and it flashes for a series of 3 to 5 flashes and automatically switches off. This in essence doesn't require you to engage the left or right indicator and then disengage it when merging etc. I know it's a trivial feature but I really liked it and well my car didn't have it.

After a little research etc I found a company called Diode Dynamics that makes a flasher relay that does that! This flasher relay also would fix the hyper blinking if you changed your turn signals etc to led's as well. Follow the link and read about everything it can do. I primarily just wanted the 'Smart Tap' feature, the others are a bonus in my eyes and I can think of a couple of mods that it will help me out in.

Anyway, I digress, onto the install:

The flasher module sits behind the cluster on the upper portion of your dashboard as you will see in the pics below. You can go from under neath and contortion yourself into doing it that way but I'm not much of a contortionist so I chose to do it by taking out the cluster etc. To take the cluster out there are two plastic screws you have to remove to remove the trim, and then there are four bolts that hold the cluster in the dash. I chose not to disconnect the cluster but you can do so at your own risk. There was enough slack in the wiring for the cluster to come out and sit on top of the dashboard.







The picture above is what you will with the cluster out of the way. Now if you look you will see a blue colored plastic cover. This is the flasher relay!













It is held in by a plastic clip to the frame. Use a panel popper and you can pop it off the frame. I also used a small plastic pry bar to actually wedge between the wiring and the frame so that I can sneak the flasher relay between the wiring harness and the frame and can access the wiring and plug it is connected to as shown in the pics below.











Unplug!







I transferred the clip across to the smart tap flasher and installed it. Install was reverse of disassembly.



Video showing working smart tap indicators.

 

Interesting. Good work.

Looks like this was introduced on LS460 at some point fo time. I am guessing 2013+ .



Even times of flashing can be customized.

 

Nice! My previous car had this and I was bummed the 460 didn't. Seems like a very straight forward install. Thanks for posting

 

It was introduced in 2010 facelift . The number of flash is configurable in the navi .

 

Thanks for write up, just took my cluster out to access the flasher cause my turn signals/hazards aren't working.

How do you like the Diod flasher? Does it work as advertised?

Thanks

 

I have it in my LS works as advertised. 4 years no issues.