Tag: 2012

Prob­lem: AT Oil Temp and Brake lights flash­ing, while the TCS light is sol­id.

Solu­tion: Turns out that both of my brake lights were out (because I did­n’t use gloves while replac­ing the bulbs a few months ago). Replaced them and haven’t had any issues since (it has been 5 days).

Dif­fi­cul­ty: Super easy.

I was dri­ving home from work on Fri­day when all of the sud­den (iron­i­cal­ly the exact same place where I got my bad flat last year) the lights on my dash light up! I was freak­ing OUT. The brake light and AT Oil Temp lights were blink­ing like crazy and the Trac­tion Con­trol light was sol­id. Those were the only lights and even though I was freak­ing out, my car was dri­ving per­fect­ly fine, no weird smells or nois­es. The check engine light was­n’t lit up. My mind kept going through all the worst case sce­nar­ios and rea­son­ings. I’d lit­er­al­ly just got­ten my car back from the shop after a very expen­sive brake and rotor replace­ment and I could only deduce that had some­thing to do with it, but how? Every­thing felt fine. It was then that I remem­bered that at a light a few min­utes ear­li­er, a nice man in an old car told me that both of my brake lights were out. That kept nig­gling around in my head, but giv­en that I had a while to go to get back home, I’m still anx­i­ety-rid­den that my car was about to erupt into flames or stop mov­ing ran­dom­ly or have smoke bil­low­ing from all over. I man­age to stop by Advanced Auto Parts to ask for a code read and the dude was look­ing at it all stumped. No codes, noth­ing wrong under the hood. I bought some brake lights from him and got back into my car. Lights were off now and I kept brac­ing for them to come back on, which final­ly did hap­pen about 10 min­utes lat­er, but by then my car seemed fine so I felt only mild­ly ner­vous dri­ving home.

Safe­ly there, I furi­ous search the inter­net and only on some ran­dom forum page 15 min­utes lat­er on a sim­i­lar but not quite top­ic, I find anoth­er sit­u­a­tion like mine, except he replaced both of his brake lights and it was fine. I was like, huh, coin­ci­dence? Not too like­ly. As it turns out, that was the answer. Replac­ing the burned out brake lights. GO fig­ure it was that easy. Make sure you use gloves when you replace those bulbs, kids. Oth­er­wise the oil from your fin­gers sit on the bulb, heat up and BOOM. Burnout.