Back up lights!!!

I may just be the happiest person in the world to have working back up lights… a few months before my grandpa (previous owner of my car) passed, he had decided to install a back up camera in the car. Unfortunately he had removed the back up light switch, stuck the end of the wiring harness in the corner of the drivers side footwell by the dimmer switch, and disconnected something, somewhere from there on back to the lights themselves. Well today I finally found the broken connection. Underneath both tail light housings, I found the purple/black wire and the black wire for the reverse lights cut off at the harness with less than an inch of it sticking out. After removing the ungodly amount of electrical tape he wrapped the entire tail light harness up with, to find about 4-5” of wire coming from the reverse lights themselves into a white wire that ran from reverse light to reverse light. So after some testing with a test light, it was determined there was in fact power coming into the trunk for them so no other breaks or disconnects anywhere else. After hooking things back up the way they should be… voilà! Working reverse lights after 8 years of on and off investigation.

Yea, those backup cameras work by detecting voltage going to the backup light and that tells the camera to illuminate the screen. At least that’s how my works.

Steve McMahan said:

Yea, those backup cameras work by detecting voltage going to the backup light and that tells the camera to illuminate the screen. At least that’s how my works.

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Makes sense. Unfortunately after my dad put things back together the camera and screen for it got misplaced so it doesn’t have one right now. Will look into a more modern solution for it. Possibly one that integrates with the rear view mirror so as not to have a screen mounted to the console like he was planning to do.

You can buy a single din unit that has a backup screen