2014 Tail light bulb replacement (LED Issue)

Bowtie619 · February 23, 2016

Hey guys,

long story short, I had a bulb out in my rear driver side. The brake light worked but when I switched to running lights the same bulb didn't work. The bulb was a 7444LL I believe ( I can verify after work). I went into autozone and took a look at the manual and it said I needed a sylvania 7443 replacement. The thing was they only has LED type and the original is not an LED. It works just fine BUT I get a dashboard error when I use my left blinker saying something like rear driver side light failure. It only comes on when I use the blinker. The lights are working fine though.

My thinking is that since they are LED lights and they consume so little power that whatever sensor is on the line for those lights is not even seeing a load therefore thinking that there is no bulb.

Did anyone else install LED light replacements and have this same problem? I want to rule out any other problems and I assume it's what I mentioned above.

Thanks!

Bowtie619 · February 23, 2016

I just realized I should have posted this is the troubleshooting section, my bad...

newdude · February 23, 2016

There is no load or resistance if you will in the circuit that an incandescent bulb provides. You will probably need to add some load resistors to duplicate the lack of an incandescent bulb. Or...you can get CANBUS LED bulbs which have resistors built in to be error free on the bulb outage system.

Bowtie619 · February 23, 2016

Thanks for the reply, I figured that was the issue.

BrandonThe1 · February 23, 2016

I swapped out all 4 bulbs on my rear light to the LED bulbs. I also purchased the resistors after I realized the error message issue. I traced the wires entering each light and installed the resistors just as instructed, across the ground and the flasher signal wire. The error message still occurred. I want to get it fixed as O'reilly will not take back the bulbs or resistors, so I am out $60 if I have to abandon them. They work, just flash fast and send the error code, which is very annoying! Anyone able to install the resistors and get them to work properly? Please let me know how you did it!