997_Toronto

I agree. It's confusing, especially in heavy traffic where people are using the brakes a lot and switching lanes. get's worse when people have malfunctioning taillights with brake or indicator lights not working right.

It's hard to gauge if the person is brake or indicating to change lanes with everything being red.

slicky rick

By the way 2010 row cars still have Amber turn signals. I even modded the front signals with my clear lenses to Amber just to match the rears

GermanCarSpecialists

I have done this probably 100+ times. Love the rear fog feature.

z3mcoupe

Bumping this thread. I have a friend who works for Porsche in Germany and I've asked him to see if he can get an answer. Is this something which can be coded or does it require ROW taillights.

I just got a Mk7 GTI and retro fitted the LED tails and coded the tail lights to flash amber.

nwGTS

You can't code for chemistry and physics. Automotive taillight applications do not use the multistate/color LEDs. They use single substrate. Red LEDs usually have a gallium based substrate. Basically the are a mixture of elements at a specific ratio. When a voltage is applied to them they hit a certain excitation state and emit light at a constant wavelength. Similar principle to fluorescent tube lighting. You can't change that by coding. You need a different ratio and/or substrate. Meaning, get yourself a set or ROW tail lights and they should be plug and play amber.

z3mcoupe

You're knowledge of LED's probably exceeds mine, but if I'm understanding you correctly, the LED tails in the MK5 GTI are capable from flashing from red to amber .

The red outer circle which remains on for the tail lamp flashes to amber once the turn signal is illuminated. They are in fact the same LED light, I have installed these on my mk5, and had to code the VAG-COM to enable the amber turn signal. Prior to the coding, they ran as 'red' only.

I'm not sure if the LED tails in the 997's have the ability to flash amber with the appropriate coding or whether the LED housings are different for the US market.

It doesn't seem like it would make financial sense to manufacture two different types of lens units.

Either way, hopefully I'll have the answer in a few days and I'll share it with you all

StormRune

z3mCoupe: nwGTS is quite correct as usual, but in the example you provide you are partially correct but only in the sense that it is possible to have a single bulb with multiple colors.

In cases like the one you are showing, the LED manufacturer embedded two (or more) LED substrate chips in the same "bulb" dome. This is how multicolor LEDs are achieved. For the bulb to change colors, the bulb must have an additional electrical lead for each additional color. Since the ground can be shared, a two-color bulb like the one you are talking about would have three electrical leads. This allows the car to select the color(s) it decides to show, or both at the same time if desired which tends to look like a third color due to the additive blending effect. Apparently the video you show has a car using LEDs with these additional leads.

Since our cars only have one positive electrical lead to enable the turn signals to flash, there is no way that the color change could be programmed via software. (Well there is, but it would require an intelligent controller embedded in the taillight to activate the different leads on the LED and a digital signal from the car's computer for this to work. This is not happening in our cars).

z3mcoupe

Thanks for the clarification. My friend from Porsche AG confirmed I will need to buy ROW tail lights to enable the amber turn lights .

gasongasoff

Anyone have the part # and/or a source for the ROW amber tail lights?

z3mcoupe

I spoke to Suncoast a while back (a few months) and at the time they confirmed they can source the ROW tails - http://www.suncoastparts.com/product/9972RTLRED.html

I've not yet bought them. They also told me that a clip would have to be removed from the lights to get them to fit, and programming would also be likely in order to get them to flash amber. Keep us posted!

Lip

I believe that ambers just aren't required in the US. Probably one less test for a manufacturer on their way to dot certification. With all of the other safety requirements, you'd think that it would be a no brainer to require amber turn signals. Alas, people don't use their blinkers much any way I suppose. .