2018 SR5 aftermarket LED tail light issue

Long story short, I gifted a 2018 SR5 to my best friend Daniel. He has had the truck now for almost a year.

About a week ago, he decided to install these cheap shitty Chinese made LED tail lights and how he is having electrical system issues.

The driver's side turn signal hyper flashes, since LEDs draw such little power; the computer thinks there is a burned out bulb. It appears that there is a built in resistor but I am not sure if it even works...

The circuits on these crappy Chinese made tail lights are hot glued into place not soldered

There are not LED bulbs, there are LED light strips (which appear to be glued into place) in the body of the tail light assembly, so he can not simply swap them back to halogen bulbs (factory).

Now the driver's factory wiring harness that the halogen bulb adapter (factory) will not flash the turn signals, yet the passenger's side factory wiring harness and factory bulbs work fine (no hyper flash). I even function tested the driver's side bulbs and the bulbs also work on the passenger side.

I drove him to the Toyota store in town, bought a brand new factory halogen bulb adapter, tested it on the driver's side and we still have the same issue as before.
He was not having these issues prior to him messing around with these cheap crappy Chinese made tail lights.

Daniel bought these tail lights on Amazon and they were advertised as a plug and play system....

I do not advise him to attempt to add any more resistors to the circuit, he needs to convert this shit back to factory.
I told him he needs to come off the $ and let the dealership fix it.

 

If he’s gotten rid of the OE tail lights, then it shouldn’t be hard to find a cheap set on here or FBMP.

But seems like you already know the issue, so now all that’s needed is to swap it out to see if there are truly any issues.

 

Did the issues start right away with the aftermarket tails or was it a week or so for them to present? Just curious if the lights were problem free until something in them failed or always a problem.

The Tundra is known to not like aftermarket led lights or bulbs unless the correct resistor is added to as well. Sounds like you only tried a halogen on the driver side, from what folks have said you will need to unplug both aftermarket lights. I'd replace both and disconnect your battery. Hopefully that will reset the system and you will be problem free.

 

Adding resistors? Has Daniel added any resistors yet? If he has did he put them in series or parallel?

 

He has not added any resistors, the resistors that are built into the body of the tail light are also connected via hot glue.


I used to repair circuit cards when I worked for BAE Systems, we do not use hot glue to connect wires or components to a circuit, we use solder.