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.