Upgrade Your Tail Light and Make Your Car More Visible

The tail light is an important part of your car’s visibility. A broken one can lead to a ticket and may be unsafe for other drivers.

Physical damage can break a tail light cover, but age and mileage also affect it. Regular maintenance is essential for proper functioning.

A malfunctioning tail light can be easily fixed by examining the fuse, wiring and bulb. LED lights are becoming more popular because they use less energy and last longer.

LED Bulbs

While upgrading headlights is often a priority for vehicle owners, tail light bulbs are another important upgrade that can help make your car more visible on the road. Brighter LED bulbs provide a more noticeable signal to drivers behind you, which can reduce the chance of getting rear-ended.

Unlike traditional halogen and incandescent bulbs, LED lights don’t contain any harmful heavy metals such as lead and mercury, so they are more environmentally friendly. Moreover, LEDs have longer lifespans than incandescent and halogen bulbs, with options that offer a life span of up to 50,000 hours. A standard 60-watt incandescent bulb costs about $40 to use for a year, while a comparable LED may add only $7 to your electricity bill over the same period.

Aside from longevity, an LED bulb’s CRI (color rendering index) rating is also a good indicator of how it will perform. A high CRI rating means the bulb will produce a more natural-looking white light that’s closer to the color of daylight.

LUYED’s 3157-compatible LED bulbs are a great option for replacing your vehicle’s rear brake and turn signal bulbs. Designed to fit most vehicles with a stock 1156 socket, these bulbs come in a white or red option and are capable of emitting a bright 6000K to 7000K Xenon-white signal. Equipped with 54 pieces of 3014 chipsets, these bulbs deliver a maximum lumen output of 1260 lumens tail light and support a working voltage range of 12 volts to 24 volts. They are easy to install thanks to a “plug and play” process that doesn’t take all day or require specialized skills.

Lenses

The lights on the rear of your car are encased in plastic lenses called tail light lenses. This helps protect the bulbs and wiring from the elements like rain, sleet and snow that would do a number on unprotected bulbs and wires. Lenses can also turn white light to a different color, for example the red translucent plastic of your taillight lens turns the white brake and signal bulbs that are encased in them into red LEDs that make you more visible to other drivers at night or in low-light conditions.

A lens can have either a convex or a concave surface. The sign convention for representing this differs from one source to another, but generally a positive R indicates that the lens’s surfaces are convex, and a negative R means they are concave. The lenses in a vehicle’s tail light use a combination of these surfaces to converge or diverge the rays of light that pass through them, depending on their function.

Lastly, a special coating is used on some of the lens surface tail light to help repel water drops, oils, and other contaminants that could cause them to crack and damage over time. This is known as SP (Surface Protection) coating and helps to prolong the life of your lens. The newest version of this is a technology called Aero Bright Coating which is developed using nanotechnology to trap low-refraction air between stable silica particles for enhanced optical performance.

Sockets

Sockets are basically fancy pipes within the kernel that can send data from one program to another. They’re used by many of the more popular protocols today including Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Unlike the network interfaces you know and love, sockets reside entirely within the system and don’t require any external hardware.

If you’ve ruled out the bulb and fuse, start by testing for voltage at the socket. Depending on the style of socket, this can be done by visual inspection – look for corrosion or melted plastic. Many sockets also have dielectric grease in them, which is great for keeping corrosion at bay.

You can also use a multimeter to probe the socket and wires for a live voltage. If you find one, trace the wire back to find where it’s getting its power and test for a hot spot. If you can’t find a hot spot, try running a bit of solder to the area and using your multimeter to stab at it – this should give you an idea of where the problem is coming from.

While your BMW is made to the highest quality standards, that doesn’t mean that it’s free of wear and tear. That’s why it’s important to follow a strict preventive maintenance schedule and shop for genuine parts. By doing so, you’ll be able to enjoy peace of mind, an ideal fit and optimal efficiency.

Wiring

The wires that run from the headlight switch to the bulb sockets and then to the lights themselves are very critical for proper operation. When these connections become damaged, it can cause the lights to not come on or to flash at a different rate than they should.

In addition, the electrical ground must be connected to something metal on the body of the car in order to prevent cross-feed between the brake, reverse and tail light circuits. Faulty or corroded ground wiring can also contribute to the failure of the tail lights.

If the tail lights, stop or reversing lights don’t turn on, the hydraulic switch may be defective. This type of switch is located in the brake line near the master cylinder and it is activated when the pressure in the brake system increases. The hydraulic switch then completes the circuit to the brake lights so they will come on.

The most common cause of tail light issues is burnt filaments. Luckily, this is easy to diagnose as it is just a matter of removing the bulb and looking for any signs of burn marks. Once the bulb is removed, simply replace it with a new one of the same wattage and color. If the problem persists, it’s time to take a closer look at the wiring.