2007 Toyota Corolla lights trouble

Parking, tail, license plate, side marker and ​instrumental panel light turn on and stay on until you stop and turn the car off.

Yeah I was a little confused by the term running lights. Normally that refers to the mandated daytime running lights that turn the headlights on but not the tail lights.

The tail light bulbs though have two filaments. The brighter one is for signal and brake lights. The other is for the tail lights. But if the license plate light doesn’t come on, yeah see above. When that happened to me it was a blown fuse for the tail lights.

I am not familiar with your vehicle. you say the brake lights work but the taillights do not. so, you have different bulbs for the brake lights than the taillights? or are they in the same bulbs?

UTube poster “Steve” believes the function is confusing:

Steve: “The positions are made really confusing because of the DRL.”

Then Steve is a little dense .

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I’ll just say it can be a little confusing. Way back I had rented an Impala and we were driving in the mountain and heavy fog. I had to stop the car and flick the switch to see whether the tail lights were on or not. I don’t remember there being a dash light telling you the lights were on. Maybe there was.

Same car I had to drive the thing around in a circle to calibrate the compass. Maybe it just came off the line too fast.

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On my old 2009 the instrument panel lights up (depending on the brightness setting) when the headlights or parking lights are on. TBH, I rely on the automatic lights most of the time and only turn them on manually in twilight conditions because it makes the speedometer easier to read.

Yeah I rarely have to fiddle with the light switch. What I do though in fog or rain is just put a piece of material over the electronic eye on the dash. That turns the full lights and tail lights on but also turns them off if I shut the car off. I don’t have to remember to shut the lights off again.

Driving lights that turn on ​automatically is great for others to see your car but, like anything automatic, it will break down and to fix it is a real pain. In my case, the rear lights do not turn on. For daytime ok but not for night driving. I have another older car with less things to go bad that I drive day or night. I am sure I will find a way to fix my Toyota problem.

Are the parking lights and/or taillights working or not?

They do not turn on.

I think the confusing thing is that the knob that you turn has both a light symbol (I assume it is to just tell you that the whole knob operates the lights) and then the dash mark to tell you what position the knob is pointing to. They should just leave that sunshine symbol off and make the position indicator more pronounced. Then of course the symbol for parking lights and the larger one for headlights really does not make a whole lot of sense unless you work with it a while.

Same symbols repeated on the dash but parking and headlights are similar. I understand this is the whole international scheme with no words but some of these symbols make no sense and would be just as easy to spell out “lights” on the dash-for the US market anyway.

What you say is good. Why even make DLR Relays? Just a convenance to go bad.

With “millions” of Corollas made, am I the only one with this problem? Do I tear into the knob, replace the DLR Relay for a few hundred $$$ or replace the computer $$$ ?

Because a relay is needed to make the Daylight Running Lights work for what is a definite safety feature . As what to do , have a good shop look at this and find the real problem instead of just replacing things.

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Sure it does. A little dot means a little bit of light, a larger dot means more light. Makes sense to me, anyway.

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Just goes to show you can’t please everyone. But it is a single big light and a double little light. Wouldn’t you think the double symbol would be the headlights? Never mind, doesn’t matter. I never really mess with it anyway and they aren’t going to change millions of stalks for me.

The symbol points toward the sides.

This is like one of those “Who’s On First” comedy sketches … lol … I guess when there’s limited real estate for icons, the manufacturer has to just do the best they can with the space available. Smart cell phones are like that too. I find the icons difficult to decode, it sometimes takes me an hour or more to get it to do what I want; but the teenagers I see seem to have no problem at all, fingers all a-twitter. I have to add some $$$ to my cell phone account this month , dreading that experience … lol …

I am not sure if this has anything to do with your rear lights or not. but it does not cost anything, and it might be helpful in the future or someone else reading the post.

2007 corolla headlight switch - YouTube

We’ve got T-bone (Tmobile) and everything is included in their monthly fee. They tell you how much you used but then exclaim it is all free.

There are only a few icons I use like Email, stocks, weather, pictures. The rest of them who knows what they do? I tend to use the ipad more because the screen is bigger for typing.