Hi guys, I'm from South Africa and just got my first REAL car, 957 GTS with 83 000 miles, and I need some advice on the reverse lights (you might call it "back up lights"). I get the warning on the display and I've checked - they don't work. Sometimes the warning goes away but even then they don't work. The auto box on the V8 does not use a switch on the transmission and the reverse lights work off the control module. Has anyone else maybe had this issue with reverse lights and any suggestions on where to start looking for the problem? Could it be possible that both bulbs are blown or maybe just a fuse?

 

Gorgeous GTS. Congratulations.

One thing you might try is to disconnect the ground for the battery for 10 minutes. You can do this just with the acorn nut in front of the driver's seat without having to tilt the seat. That will reset the bulb controller. If that doesn't work, you may need to access one of the taillight plugs and test to see if you're actually getting 12v on the reverse light wire in the harness. If you are, the problem is in the lights themselves. If not it's in the wiring or controller.

If someone tried to install brighter led re erase light bulbs, they don't have enough resistance and they may work a couple times, but once the controller sees what it thinks are non functioning bulbs long enough, it will stop sending power to that circuit. The battery disconnet will reset that.

 

Thanks for the reply. I checked the reverse lights' bulbs and they are both still standard bulbs and are still good. I also checked the fuse and there wasn't a 5A fuse installed at nr 43 for the reverse lights (not sure if previous owner maybe took it out) so I installed a new fuse but they're still not working. I'll disconnect the battery for 10 min and hope for the best. I seriously hope it's not the controller as that is pretty expensive apparently.

 

A problem I've had recently in a few of my rear lights is just a loss of conduction back there due to 20 years of surface corrosion, although it is barely visible.

So if you have a multimeter, to confirm the bulb assembly is all good, you can measure the resistance at the wires on the back panel of the light assembly. In my case, the bulbs themselves were good, but the conducting parts of the circuit needed a little cleaning up and bending to maintain solid contact.

With both lights out at the same time (if only one light failed, you'd get a dash warning about it so it's not like you could have overlooked just one failing until the second one failed as well), this is probably not your problem, but for careful debugging should be more reliable.

 

Just checking to see if you were able to resolve the issue? I am getting the warning but my reverse lights are working, I ordered a bunch of new fuses and will get them tomorrow to check.

 

The issue with my Reverse lights was that the previous owner put some LED lights in to replace the reverse lights and it caused the error message I got. Put some standard Halogen in and that got rid of the error message.

 

Thanks for updating. I don't think anyone has found some bright led reverse lights that don't eventually cause errors