Some of you may remember the frustration I am having trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my tail light ---- here it is copied and pasted from my thread

Ok, I have a very weird problem that I simply cannot figure out the root cause of.

My passenger side tail light is out (not the brake light, the light that goes on when the headlights are on.... brake light works fine). I bought a new bulb and I know that isnt the problem.

Here is where it gets weird..... I took the passenger side tail light assembly out of the car (the entire thing) and plugged it in to the drivers side tail light harness and it works fine. I took the drivers side tail light out and plugged into the passenger side harness, it works fine. This tells me two things; 1, that the passenger side harness works and 2, that the passenger side tail light works.

BUT when I plug the passenger side tail light into the passenger side harness (the way it is supposed to be) the tail light does NOT work. What in the world is going on? I have no clue why this is happening. Anyone have any ideas?




Now, for a while I have had one of my angel eyes out on my passenger side. The more I think about it, I am almost positive that the tail light problem cropped up the same day I took apart the headlight to try and figure out what was wrong with the angel eyes. Could I have messed something up in the front with the angel eyes that is causing my tail light problem???

I even went and bought a NEW set of tail lights to make sure I wont be chasing my tail. The new lights still have no passenger side tail light illumination :( Something must be wrong with the CAR, not the lights.

Ok - you covered most of the bases already, so that's good. New lights shouldn't fix it because the new tail light will be wired the same as the old one. The light is a very simple circuit so nothing can really go wrong there - basicaly the pins leading from the connector join up to little trails that lead to their respective bulbs.

Your angel eyes is hooked up to the 'parking lights', correct? As in, position 1 on the headlight switch. In that case the tails and the parking lights (and hence the angel eyes) should be somehow connected on the circuit. When you took the angel eyes out, what did you do and did you manage to fix it at all? Or is it still off?

I would for starters narrow it down even further by disconnecting all angel eyes and see if the tail light works. If not, it sounds like some wiring has gotten mixed up - or perhaps something shorted at some point. If you have a Bentley, you could look up the wiring diagram to see the link between the two.

here is a simple thing you can do. all e36's tail lights were NOT made the same. they all have different pin configurations

unhook the tail light that doesnt work (the plug that goes into the tail lights which comes out of the trunk) now look at all those pins, and make sure everything matches. my previous tail lights kept giving me errors, the problem was some pins were blanks but they shudnt have been!

it all matches... the problem came up on stock tail lights