Tail Lights Out: A Comedy of Errors Involving a Dog, Duct Tape, and One Very Stubborn Fuse
A few months ago my beloved eldest son had an altercation with a (hearty!) bit of shrubbery while parking at a Bible study. To temporarily fix the busted headlight, I cut the section of the bumper below it (that houses the fog light) and replaced the headlight assembly
Note if you look closely in that image, you’ll see the wires that run to the headlight and the fog light duct taped to the windshield washer fluid reservoir.
That’s a key part of the story.
After I replaced the headlight, I confirmed that it’s legal to drive without one fog lamp, and said (likely aloud) “when I fix the bumper, we’ll deal with those extra cables”
A couple of weeks later, the dog decided he’d take care of those cables for me, and chewed/jerked them free from their duct tape prison.
In so doing, the dog (nor his owner, nor his owner’s father who resolutely did not want a dog at the time the dog was given to us) was unaware that he’d created the perfect scenario to create a short in the circuit that controls (a) Fog lights, (b) tail lights, (c) license plate light, (d) the front parking lights, and (e) a control that dims and brightens dash lights when the headlights are on.
The next time those headlights were switched on (nobody noticed the chewed wires strewn around our yard, myself included) a fuse quietly blew in the panel beneath the driver-side dash, but not before it took out the bulbs in both tail lights, charring one socket. We noticed none of the above.
Sidenote: it’s fairly brilliant that fuses are a thing. They keep your dog from being able to kill you by accident.
Fast forward a few weeks, and it was foggy one morning. Jacqueline was driving behind Benjamin as they left for school in the morning, and noticed that his tail lights were not on.
So the “problem for some other day” became the “top priority to give us back the correct number of vehicles.” Thanks eager canine.
With the guidance (and borrowed heat gun) of my electrician father-in-law, I spliced together all the wires (except for the identical blues, which I left wire-nutted to confirm before splicing) and then drove the car into the garage for that confirmation.
Reader: I did not know I was going to put the car in the garage for a week.
In my tests, the tail lights still did not work, even after the spliced wires were spliced. It’s probably the bulbs.
That’s when I discovered the blown bulbs, having already determined that the fuse was blown. Trip to auto store #1 commences. At that store, I purchased bulbs clearly marked “off road use only.” Perhaps I wanted to drive my parking-lot-rated tall Camry on some trails.
After returning home ( plus postponing the repair to go live life of chasing children around to sporting events) and discovering my bulb-fail, trip to auto store #1 part two commenced. I got new bulbs and a multimeter. I got the multimeter just in case, and because I hear that’s a thing that real mean own.
After an appropriate amount of hours to account for a job, and a side gig, and a date with my wife, I installed the correct bulbs, fired up the car, and… nothing happened.
Reader: this was an excellent time to triple check the fuse configuration. So that’s what I did. For thoroughness, I even put the fuse into the only other open slot on the panel, just to confirm that the problem was not my ability to read while stuffing myself horizontally into a space designed for about 1/6th of my body to fit.
There. I’ve confirmed that it’s not the fuse, and even tested (with a continuity checker light that I purchased on trip number 1 to auto store #1) and confirmed that I had current on both sides of the fuse. The fact that it was both not blown, AND had current assured me (and my AI assistant) that I was dealing with some deeper issue like a pinched wire somewhere, a loose ground, or some other dark magic that they don’t teach you in religion or poetry classes at UNC.
With the benefit of hindsight, this would have been another great spot to triple check the fuses again. Instead, I tore apart nearly the entire interior of the car (with a trim removal kit I had purchased a couple of weeks prior while perusing the aisles at Wal-Mart waiting on an oil change).
As a side note: Toyota makes all of the interior trim plastic exceedingly easy to remove, with one exception. Every piece of plastic breaks free with only those maddening plastic clips and a bit of aggression. The exception? That panel covering the sides of the cargo area, which sports THREE half-inch bolts (which do serve purposes other than securing the plastic, to be sure: they are holding the seatbelts as well as the hooks that secure cargo directly to the frame). But c’mon Toyota: you could certainly find a way to have the plastic pop off separately from the seatbelts.
After several pauses to again chase a child around to a sporting event (some of which I coached 8U style), I found no evidence of any break in continuity in the circuit, but the entire back end of the car was not getting power.
I have discovered that if you take a photo, and annotate it, and feed it to an AI tool, you can say things like “the wires with green arrows are hot” and your trusty AI assistant can again ask you to check the fuses.
This is a good spot to mention the one critical detail that I skipped earlier: I did not confirm that the fog lights were working. See the image above. There is no fog light. Also on the circuit I was checking (in the same way a raccoon might check for a hidden piece of cheese at the bottom of a garbage can) were the “parking lights” which any experienced mechanic would differentiate from the “daytime running lights.”
I however am not an experienced mechanic. I just saw lights when I turned the switch, and that was enough proof for me that everything on the circuit was working. Well, everything but the tail lights. And the license plate light.
But those are on the back of the car. So there’s a break somewhere on the back of the car, or at least in that direction.
(returns to racooning the back of the car, after a brief stopover to raccoon the steering column)
Here’s where things got interesting (if only for the people at auto store #s 1, 2, and 3). I removed the wire harness from the passenger side tail light assembly, and carried it to all of the stores in town, only to find out that you can’t buy just the wire harness. You have to drop 279 American dollars (plus tax) to get the entire taillight assembly. 279 bucks for a part that you’re not even sure will fix the car, and one that will surely not match the other (used) taillight assembly.
The kind people at auto store #3 took a look at my harness and said “That wire is fine, you really shouldn’t buy a new one. It’s not your problem. Have you checked the fuses?”
Have I checked the fuses? Yes, I’m not an idiot.
I returned home and got briefly (for about 4 hours) sidetracked by a mystery plug near the tail light with nothing plugged into it, and I won’t detail that part of the story where I literally tried to square peg a rectangular hole with anything else that could potentially fit into it.
Turns out that’s a hidden connector that would enable me (if I had the desire) to after-market modify my 2WD machine into an AWD machine. Thanks AI assistant, that’s cool. But not, um, relevant to the tail lights.
I never could figure out how to use the multimeter to test anything, so at this point I made my continuity checker light (which comes with a cool little clip that you can connect to a ground) reach all the way from the negative pole on the battery to the back end of the car. I felt sure given my 3 minutes of trying to make it work that I could ground that clip to anything grounded nearby, but it only worked by directly connecting to the battery itself. So I cut a 20-foot length of cable, and dutifully wound it around the vehicle to reach the battery. I felt my father-in-law mocking me in my heart—I had not invited him to mock me in my garage.
My homemade continuity checker confirmed what the bulbs had already confirmed: there’s no current going to the back end of the car.
It was around this point that I took a break to sit on the weight bench in the garage. After asking my AI assistant (who, to be fair, told me again to triple check the fuses, even though it thought the parking lights were working because…I told it the parking lights were working) how much this repair was going to cost once I gave up and drove a racoon-decorated car to the shop, I briefly considered starting a large fire in the yard and then driving my car onto it.
Out of options, and now a full week from my splicing adventure that I thought would fix it in 45 minutes, I returned again to the fuse panel.
Just as I had a week ago, I read the panel cover and muttered under my breath “the tail circuit is on the 10 amp fuse beside the 7.5 amp fuse for the instrument panel” and crammed myself under the steering wheel with a flashlight.
And there it was. My shiny new 10 amp fuse, nestled in beside the… 15 AMP fuse for the seat heaters.
I called myself some unkind names, moved the fuse into the correct hole, extricated myself from the floorboard, and peeked sheepishly around the vehicle.
The driver-side tail light (now dangling out like a bit of shiny gouda at the end of a wire harness) was ON.
I briefly contemplated the ramifications for punching the metal garage wall, and decided instead to go with “take a walk around the yard and text my wife asking her why she would marry an idiot.”
So here we are. I’ve reassembled the car (only losing one nut that I hope does not matter) and learned at least two valuable lessons:
- Don’t drive your car into shrubbery.
- Don’t leave your half-repaired car for your dog to try and manslaughter you.
Anybody selling a bumper for a base model 2011 RAV4?
