New car, new question!

In both cases it's almost certainly burned out bulbs.

After you replace the bulbs, be sure to turn the dash light dimmer down always so that bulbs will not burn out nearly as fast.

Or replace the bulbs with LED retrofits and never have to replace them again.

They can still be replaced by LEDs. I just did this the other night with the display illumination in my old Blaupunkt CD player. The original illumination was a tiny incandescent lamp with a green rubber sleeve over it. I didn't have any surface mount LEDs so I took a regular 5mm one and filed it down into a tombstone shape and soldered it into place with a 2K resistor in series. Put it back together and it looks great.

I replaced the similar tiny bulbs in the window switches of a Saab 900 with 3mm green LEDs a few years ago and that worked nicely too.

Are the LEDs available from the dealer and are they dimmable?

Over the past several years I've benefited from my brother-in-law's career progression through the automotive industry: he started in custom exhaust (cheap exhaust repairs), moved to a GM dealer (got my

760 blower motor from a Cavalier), then to Porsche (my last 850 had its complete AC rebuilt by Porsche mechanics) and now, finally, he works for Volvo.

He has suggested that the computer backlights could be fixed for the price of bulbs and lunch. If the bulbs, however, get brought from outside I worry the mechanics will have hang-ups about doing the job. I would do the radio work myself since I can easily pull the part and do it on the bench at home.

So if the LEDs are a dealer part, where are they "supposed" to go? That way we can track down the part number. Of course, if they require the additional soldering of resistors then I can pretty much forget about it.

No, they're just ordinary LEDs from an electronics supplier, I don't know what specific place those particular LEDs came from, one of my main hobbies is electrical engineering so I have closets and boxes full of that sort of stuff. I think the one I used most recently came from a batch I bought on ebay. They can be dimmed, but are not in this application.

Sounds like what I did is beyond what you are interested in doing. It was a custom modification that I did involving some careful cutting and filing, then soldering in the LED and resistor where I could fit them, not some drop-in replacement.

There *is* an LED solution you may want to look into though, several companies sell direct LED retrofits that plug into the existing sockets. I seem to have lost the link, but it was someone here who pointed me to one of them in the first place.

I'll look for that. Thanks James!