Cruise Control Issue

[Atrais]

So I noticed recently that if I'm going down the hwy with cruise control on and I turn on my turn signal to change lanes or what have you, it cancels the cruise like if you canceled it with the steering wheel stalk. Everything works (the dash button, all the functions of the stalk, tapping the brake cancels) but not being able to signal with the cruise control active is a little annoying.

Has anyone run into this? I did recently replace the rear brake light bulbs and running lights (everything except the turn signal bulbs because I didn't want them to "fast blink') with LEDs and am thinking the lower load from the LEDs may have something to do with it.

Any ideas?

 

[mcskibadee1]

Mine wasn't working when I bought it because It had leds in the brake lights. Switched them to factory and started working again. I think the car uses everything as one big loop? Maybe when you put the blinker on the signal dead ends right there and can't loop back around?

 

[Atrais]

Thanks for the input, that pretty much confirms my suspicions. I'm also toying with the idea of simply wiring in a resistor and seeing if that does the trick. It sucks as one of the advantages of the LEDs will be negated by adding in that extra load but at least it's not full time (only when braking).

 

[JohnnyBfromPeoria]

Superbrightleds.com has load resistors. That would probably do the trick. Please let us know what the solution is, as I've not heard of this issue before, but it makes sense that the LED's might be the culprit.

John B.

 

[RyanY]

You will need to wire in load resistors. I had a similar issue on my Miata after installing LED taillight bulbs - cruise control wouldn't work when the taillights were on. I added load resistors and the problem went away.

 

[Atrais]

Superbrightleds.com has load resistors. That would probably do the trick. Please let us know what the solution is, as I've not heard of this issue before, but it makes sense that the LED's might be the culprit.

John B.

Will do. I'm going to try the local radio shack for some resistors tomorrow. Hopefully just doing the main brake lights does the trick and I don't have to do the 3rd brake light bulbs as well.

You will need to wire in load resistors. I had a similar issue on my Miata after installing LED taillight bulbs - cruise control wouldn't work when the taillights were on. I added load resistors and the problem went away.

Thanks!

 

[Atrais]

Just an update:

So when I swapped out the bulbs for LEDs on the rear of the truck I did them all: all the bulbs in the taillights, the 3rd brake light, license plate plate, etc except for the turn signal bulbs. So after looking at the wiring diagram again I just went to the autoparts store and got 2 of the 2057 bulbs for the rear lights and swapped them out for the LEDs in the center of the taillight housings. Took the truck for a spin and the cruise control worked perfectly. So now I know that as long as I have a sufficient load on that bulb circuit I'm good to go.

So now there's 3 wires that go to that bulb. One is ground, one is for running light illumination, and the third is for brake light illumination. I suspect I'll only need a resistor between the brake light illumination (+) wire and the (-) wire so I'm going to put the LEDs back in and try that. If the cruise control malfunctions again I'll probably need to add a second resistor between the remaining (+) running light wire and (-) wire.

The good news is that the 3rd brake light LEDs and the other 2057 bulbs in the tailights don't seem to be affecting cruise control operation so there's a possibility I can get away with only having to splice in 2 resistors (we'll see). Another thought that occured to me is if swapping the turn signal bulbs for LEDs would mitigate this load issue (I'd been avoiding this so I didn't want the turn signals to "fast blink" ). However I may pick up a pair and see if that solves the issue as I believe that the load difference between the LEDs and the remaining turn signal bulbs is the root cause and not just the fact that the LEDs in the brake lights are drawing less power.

 

[Atrais]

Last update: Everything works.

If anybody else runs into this problem you just need to wire a LED load resistor (approx 50W, 6ohms) in parallel with the brake light illumination wires (solid green and black) for each taillight.