:confused: When I turn on the right blinker all the lights in the back flash including the blinker. When I hit the brake all the lights in the back light up including the blinker light in back and front. My car is a 1995 Subaru Legacy. Has anyone had this problem happen before? I am having a hard time finding someone to fix it. The subaru dealership wants to charge $60.00 an hour :eek:

It is pretty clear that your right blinker wire has somehow become shorted to the tail light circuits, so that energizing one circuit lights up the other. Have you done anything that could have disturbed the wiring? Items in the trunk shorting out the tail lights? If nothing is obvious by visual inspection, it may take someone with a voltmeter and a wiring diagram to sort it out. This could be your chance to buy a multimeter, learn about electricity and save some money :)

Another possibility is that your rear light is not grounding.

I'm with John.

It's so funny when people will let Subaru charge them (i.e. please don't let them!) the full service charge to do something Subaru techs can't do. I mean you might be lucky and get one of maybe 100 mechanics in the US that understand 12v. And even luckier to get one that has fixed enough components to know inherently where to start troubleshooting... and actually chose to work for a Subaru dealer. If you do take it there, insist on seeing the mechanic's tool box. No multimeter, back the car out. He'll just use the manual.
Step 1: Disconnect negative battery terminal... oops...
Step 2: Bad idea... Reconnect that. (that was 10 of your dollars right there.)
Step 3: Remove every bulb from inside and outside of the car... arrange them in a circle around you. Roll up in a ball and cry.
Step 4: Replace all the bulbs with new $5 a-piece ones. Dry your tears with the customer's wallet.
Step 5: Skip to step 1:


I'd charge $60 an hour because it wouldn't take an hour to fix. But I'd only charge $10 to rebuild your tranny... because I've never done it before. You'd be paying to educate a mechanic, and he may very well get a 4 year degree in the back of your car. Let's see. Four years at 52 weeks.... 5 days a week and 8 hours each day... times 60... carry the 4... well. It's a lot.

After looking at a wiring diagram in the Haynes manual, it looks like a missing ground could cause the problem. The stop, tail and turn lamps on each side of the car are grounded together, separately from the lamps on the other side.

If the right rear lamps lost their common ground, they would ground through other rear lamps when they were energized. The missing ground would cause unintended series-parallel combinations of lamps. This unusual current flow through the other lamps would light them up too, but often dimly.

For example, some of the brake lights would come on at full brightness if energized by the brakes, but dimly if powered by the turn signals. The right front turn signal would be at full brightness if energised by the turn signal switch, but dim if it was powered by the brakes. The right rear turn signal would always be dim. Etc.

If the problem is caused by a short between the blinker and tail lamp circuits, all the lamps would come on at full brightness.