04 having some strange brake light issues. With head lamps on and brake pedal pressed I have no brake light on the driver side. With headlamps off and brake pedal pressed I get a brake light but slightly dimmed compared to passenger side.


Test light made it seem like circuit was working correctly. Also, the cyclopse brake light is not functioning. I have not started to investigate that but maybe related?


Another thing, my cruse control works. I thought that I heard that if the brake lights or taillights were non functional that the cruise control would not work for safety reasons.


Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.

 

Sounds like a bad ground.
If you park outside a rat or squirrel chewed through a ground wire.

Cruise has it's own switch on the brake pedal so I don't think the two are related.

The D1 had a vacuum switch on the brake pedal too.
not sure if D2 has vacuum switch.

 

You may be right on a bad ground. Im horrible with electronics but I did notice that the three wires going into the bulb assembly the brown wire (I assume that it is the ground wire) gave no power to my test light.


I will look further into the ground.


Thanks,

 

There are two ground connectors for the rear and they are located inside the truck, aft of the rear wheel wells, hidden behind little plastic louvers. I had the same problem as you and it turned out the LH ground connector had come undone.

 

I have the same issue, looked in the access panel area and didn't see any issues but that was 3 months ago. I'll look again. Thanks for the reminder of 2 grounds.

 

OK here is an idea.
Take the bulb out that is malfunctioning.

Get a thin piece of wire.
put the wire in the socket so it is touching the inner wall of the socket.
Now put the light bulb over this wire to hold the wire in place.
the wire must be only touching the side of the metal socket - the bulb holder and not the prongs that supply power to the light bulb.

now, attach this wire to a phillips sheet metal screw near by and ground the wire.

Then see if things are better.

 

Ok that made it work. My next question is....should I make my own ground like this and roll with it? Or does this simply mean that we know we have a bad ground somewhere in the line and I have to fix it?

 

It turns out that the brown wire (ground) going into the bulb socket is not making consistent contact. The socket will need to be replaced as it is sealed and no real way to get to the terminal.


My next step is to track down a new one and splice it in.


Thanks for all the help.