Rear Lexus Lights

I

n my opinion, Lexus-style lights look gopping on most colour schemes, especially dark metallics (Kermy is close to a dark metallic). So when I took off some of the tinting coating (after track time at Ford Fair) on the kid’s standard-but-tinted rear lights, I dismissed having Lexus-style lights almost immediately. Then, true to form, I started doing some research into functional benefits of replacing the lights. I figured that there would not be any but, hey, if there’s something to research I’ll research it!

I discovered that getting the right set of rear lights would improve the effectiveness of the reversing lamp. Now this might not seem like a very good reason to upgrade the rear lights, but we live on a street where we frequently need to reverse park at night (for over half of the year) and one can never have too much light back there.

After digging I found what looked like a perfect set of lights, but many Ka owners had reported problems wiring them up. These included the need for a dual filament, offset pin combined tail and brake light and wiring looms being incompatible with the standard Ka rear light sockets. Well, buying the offset pin dual filament bulbs was absolutely no problem whatsoever and as for the rewiring... The secret is ensuring you have the correct left and right hand loom for each lamp and if necessary, swap the bulb holders around.

P21W and PY21W

Many non-headlight conventional bulbs use P21Ws for tail lights and PY21Ws for indicators. The difference between the bulbs is the location of the pins - P21Ws have pins opposite one another whereas PY21Ws have an angle. This means that it is impossible to replace P21Ws with PY21Ws and vice-versa (okay, you can force the bulbs home but this isn’t a good idea).

When I first received the bulbs, the indicators had the fittings for P21Ws and the fog / reversing lamps had fittings for PY21Ws. “Oh that’s not too bad,” I foolishly thought, “I’ll just buy clear PY21Ws and orange P21Ws.”

Well, could I find ordinary conventional road legal clear PY21Ws? No. I could find all manner of LED bulbs that come in either fitting in a variety of colours ranging from white through to orange, red, blue and green, but very few (if any) are road legal. I did consider using these but the more I researched, the more I realised that these are not ideal for a few reasons. One, as indicators the current drain will confuse the Ka such that it’ll believe a bulb is out and will flash the indicator much quicker than it should be. You can also get resistors to put inline with the LED bulbs but this is additional aggravation and hassle that I can’t be doing with when all LED bulbs I’ve seen are illegal for road use. LED bulbs are also compromised in some respects because of the way the LED works. Some modern bulb designs punt light out towards the reflector but the beam isn’t as diverse as I would like; as a reversing light most LED bulbs are probably going to be compromised.

For combination tail and brake lights, LEDs have genuine appeal except unless we used an inline resistor they’ll confuse the cruise control system and it won’t engage or disengage. As I put above I cannot be bothered setting inline resistors up (part of the benefit of LEDs is their low power consumption so deliberately increasing the power consumption of the circuit removes this advantage), the simplest solutions were to either rewire the loom or to replace the bulb holders.

In the end it was easier to remove the bulb fittings and swap them over, which was a time consuming and slightly fiddly job simply because the wiring looms are not all that large. Anyway, once done, it was relatively easy to fit the looms into the boot, attach the rear lights and admire the work.