Car Reverse Lights Not Working How to Diagnose Wiring Might Be a Splice Hack

Whoa. Hey, where's your reverse lights?

Okay. So I got the truck inside the studio here, and one of the first things that I wanna do is check for power going to those reverse lights. I know that both of my reverse lights were out so that doesn't tell me that it's probably a bulb, it kind of leads me away from that, I feel it's a little to power issue. Let's start at the fuses.

Now typically when you're looking for your fuses, you can find out where they're gonna be located inside of your owner's manual. If you don't have one, generally you can either find it on the side, underneath your dash, or even inside the engine compartment. Ours happens to be located right here, and on the panel, I even have a little legend. I'm gonna look for something that says "backup lamp" or "reverse lights." Now on our particular one, it tells me that it's fuse number 26 and it's a 15 amp. So I'm gonna look at the little legend here, I'll find it, and then I'll come right along like this and then I'll find it inside my actual fuse box.

More than likely, everybody is gonna have one of these multi-meters and they're very simple. You just wanna set it to DC Voltage and we're gonna check to see if we have power on both prongs of that fuse. So now I'm just gonna hook up my multi-meter. I'm gonna find a ground, which is pretty much just anything that's bare-metal on your body, and then I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna test one side of my fuse. If I look at the multi-meter, I can see that I'm looking at approximately 12 volts. That's telling me that we've got battery power going to this prong, but let's check the other side, same thing, approximately 12 volts. This looks amazing. That tells me that the fuse good and we can move along. Now that we checked the fuses, let's get under the vehicle.

All right, so we have a manual transmission which means that our reverse switch is gonna be located on the driver side of the transmission. Just looking at this, I see some...well, I wouldn't exactly say OE standard wiring here. It looks as though somebody maybe tried to wire something into the reverse switch, and it even goes up and into the actual cabin of the truck, which is very strange to me actually.

Now being a mechanic, one of the first things I would try to do is to try to figure out why somebody put extra wire in here. More than likely, it's because there's an issue with the actual reverse switch on this. And for some reason, maybe they just didn't wanna service it/replace it. The good news is, for this particular model, we actually offer it at 1aauto.com. In all honesty, it's under 20 bucks, so I don't see why anybody would want to go through the hassle of wiring this up because of course, any time that you go ahead and splice into your original wiring, you create an opportunity for moisture to make its way in there and of course if it made its way, it could potentially damage the rest of your wiring harness. This is actually very unsafe. It's not something that you should do. And of course, if your reverse lights aren't working, why would you just go ahead and try do a hack like this? We've already checked our fuse and we know that we have power there, so that's what led us down under here. Well for me, a fix for this would be of course, we have to try to fix up this wiring. I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of all the excess stuff that shouldn't be on there, and I'll just try to resplice in a new connector with, of course, some nice sealed connectors here. We don't want any moisture getting up inside there. That's very bad. Other than that, I would of course try to test that reverse switch and see if that's actually functioning the way that it needs to. If it isn't, well, 1aauto.com, I would just get on there, order myself a new one.

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