Escalade Taillights installed on 2015 Tahoe

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mbp1979

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I'm going to attempt to explain this along with everything else I've been through dealing with these different taillights. There's not much info any where on these lights or the vlands other than people complaining about them just a lot of useless info. So I will share what I've done. First I started by buying a set of the vland lights off ebay around Christmas however due to me being lazy and it being cold I didn't try to install them until around may at which time I found out for some odd reason the pass side did not fit. I thought maybe I received a bad light with a bad mold which I contacted the seller and he sent me another light for the pass side and it didn't fit as well which really pissed me off because of all the down time and shipping costs. So I decided to get a set of the OEM escalade lights and see how they fit. They fit perfect out of the boxes. So with that being said the vland lights not only having led issues they have fitment issues on the pass side. So then I got the wiring diagrams for our vehicles there's 4 different wiring diagrams all based on vin number. But pretty much there's the Escalade, Yukon, Tahoe/Suburban, and I assume the police version but I'm not 100 percent sure each being different. On a Escalade and Yukon there's 2 wires for the brake light and turn signal's. On the Tahoe/ Suburban there's only one wire that controls the turn signal and brake lights. That's were all the problems are coming from with the lights. On the vland lights they work on the Yukon's because there's two wire's one for the turn signal and one for the brake light also on there lights the brake lights are red and the turn signals there yellow. Now on the Tahoe version they have had issues due to the one wire so what they have done is take the yellow led turn signal and change it to red and wire it together with the brake light so anytime you hit the turn signal both the long and short led bar will light up. That's there fix to the issue. Now I got the escalade lights and figured all the wiring and got them to work flawless. I will show what I did to get everything to work on my Tahoe right or wrong this is what I did and I have zero issues or error messages.

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This is the back of the escalade tail lights along with the wiring harness that you will have to modify to get everything to work correctly. Also on the escalade tail light there's a black filler panel on the bottom of the tail light that will need to be removed it just unclips and set it to the side.

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Now if you look at the pics above this is what your going to do on the harness on the escalade tail light is cut the yellow wire in half and the red wire in half. I'm not going to explain what each wire is for because it will get people confused and its not necessary information. The yellow wire coming from the plug side your going to just cap it off its not used. Then your going to take the red wire that is coming from the plug and solder to the yellow wire going to the escalade tail light side. Along with the two resistors 6 ohm 50 watt (Link Below) these are what keeps it from hyper flashing and sending error messages to ur dash. Just take the two wires on one side of each resistor and solder them all together and shrink and tape. Then the other two wires coming from each resistor go to ground which if you look at the harness there's two black wire's on pins one and six ones a smaller gauge wire that's your reverse lights. The larger being ground solder both these wires on the ground wire the thick black wire. Now tape everything up and make it look factory.

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The above pic is what it should look like when done this is also where you have a decision to make as in the pic you see a red wire coming off the escalade tail light. This is the turn signal. The easy way is to just cap this off so when you hit the turn signal only the long red led bar will light up this will work the same as in our original tail lights. Which is perfectly O.K to do. However I'm very OCD and have to always go the extra step. There's a way to get the turn signals the smaller yellow led's to work but its a little time consuming or you can just cap and install and be done.
 
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mbp1979

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If you want to do like I did your going to need some zip cord like in the above pic its just standard 16 gauge stinger zip cord its all the same and some 1/4 wire loom.

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To get the turn signals to work your going to have to run wires from each of the front two turn signals in each headlight plug back to the rear of each tail lights. As in the above pics you can see the driver side turn signal wire is blue/white which is in the headlight plug and the pass side is green/purple in the other head light plug. I started on the pass side and soldered and taped the wire on my zip cord and loomed it and routed it along side of the fender beside the battery and along the firewall to the drivers side and used my other wire on the zip cord and did the same thing on the drivers side and routed the wires inside the loom down the factory harnesses on the frame rail to the drives side rear and over to the pass side rear. Now I will have working yellow led turn signals as well.
 
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mbp1979

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Now its time to install the lights just route the harness along with the resistors down just like you removed the oem stock ones.

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This is what it should look like from underneath where the harness plugs in at the factory harness. You also see my wire that I ran from the front turn signal on the drivers side.

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Now you need a bracket to mount the resistors on you cant just leave them hanging they get hot really hot. I bought some aluminum 90 degree angle bar stock and some 6/32 1 inch bolts and 6/32 nylon lock nuts and cut me two brackets and drilled out the holes to mount the resistors too.

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This is what its should look like when its done I used 3/4 self tapping screws and mounted the bracket to the bottom side where the oem plug holder was located. I then got a male and female terminal to hook the turn signal wire up just incase I need to remove the tail light I can just unplug the two and remove the tail light.
 
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mbp1979

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I then install all 5 of the factory t15 screws back into the light and put the two factory snap in panels back on this is the easy part. I hope this helps some of you guys out if you have any questions I'll be glad to help.

The pics below are for reference showing vlands and oem escalade lights side by side. The drivers side is a vlands light the passenger side is a oem escalade light.

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This is just the parking lights these pics look crappy and don't do them justice. But in person the vland lights look better than the escalade lights far as parking lights but that's it.

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Now this is a pic of the brake lights as you can see on the vland both led's long and short are on. The escalade light only the long led bar is on and there is no comparison the escalade ones are way brighter than the vlands.

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Here's a pic of the turn signal on the escalade light both the yellow short led bar and long red led bar both light up these are very bright.

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Now this pic is the drivers side vland's turn signal both the short and long red led bars light up but are very dim compared to the escalade.
 

Prormk

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Nice write up. Forums are priceless when it comes to member input like this.
 

sumo

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You're gonna confuse the hell out of all the other Esky owners lol. Good job man
 

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