Two Options for LEGAL Brightness Levels

I'm looking to upgrade to new LED tails and turns soon. I want the added safety of bright unmistakable lights on the road or in adverse driving conditions like fog / rain / dust.

But I also want to exercise a little light discipline too. Some times I'm off road at night near camp sites and don't want blazing lights. Easy enough to turn the headlights to parking mode and not be giving people in tents a free x-ray session. But the tails are so bright on some of these LED options that I'd like to be able to flip a switch and lower the light. Not shut it off, but bring it to some mood lighting levels out of consideration of others looking to enjoy the wilderness.

And I know that off highway / off road use, I could get away with lower than legal levels of light. I just want to keep it to legal levels in case the switch stays in low mode on the tarmac accidentally.

Is that a thing that exists? I haven't seen it if it is.

 

I don't think there's really a market for what you're looking for. It would be a huge liability to offer a product lile this, anyone involved in a rear end collision would be serving the manufacturer up on a silver platter to lawsuits from the insurers involved and the people whose vehicles coverage was dropped for installing them.

I'm not sure there's a way to wire in an auxiliary set of taillamps without the usual issues people run into when attempting to be able to black put their vehicles lamps. Especially not without causing issues with the braking system.

 

You bring up some real humdingers of an excellent point.

Oh well - good news is that the amount of time I spend driving around a campsite at night is a pretty small percentage of my time. I'll continue to be a conscientious as possible and be comfortable with the fact that someone is getting tent roasted by my LED's. Better than getting backed over in the darkness - aye?

 

Honestly, I've never felt a need to dim my tail lights in a campsite myself (and that's with an LED conversion of my own, detailed below). Headlights on the other hand though... Certainly.
I would think most people expect to see vehicle lights at some point when in a crowded campsite / camped immediately next to a road or other vehicle path. I guess if I had to, I'd try to use the parking brake if I ever needed to avoid lighting up the brake lights.


I used red LED bulb replacements (Sylvania 7443R) in the OE housings, reconfigured so both bulbs operate together as one (entire light lights up for braking, entire light flashes for turn signal). This improved the visibility of the Brake & Turn functions several-fold (and came out better/brighter than many of the aftermarket LED tails I've seen too), while still keeping a stock appearance.

 

FOR SURE!
Was camping at Chevelon Lake when a group of teens rolled in at 11:30 and had ALL of their lights roasting. Headlights, ditch lights, grill lights. Three trucks with every light you could imagine. They set up camp (took forever) then built a rager of a bonfire and drank and blared music until 4:00 AM.

When the sun came up they realized how close they were to us and apologized. Turns out two of them were professional tournament fishermen.

How - V-Tails or DIY?

 

That's cool at least they apologized... IME, most don't even do that. I might've done something to make my presence known, depending on what the circumstances were (like whether my camp had been visible from wherever it was they pulled in from, etc. (shining a flashlight, etc.).

DIY.
I built electronic modules to allow the blinker to flash w/o the brake light interfering, but then some time later I saw these "switchback modules" available that appear to be identical in function (so there's now a ready-to-use module available for someone wanting to do what I did).
https://www.diodedynamics.com/s1-switchback-module-pair.html
I guess V-Tails are also similar, although I still have the stock reverse light bulbs (always had plans to add aux reverse lights with a new rear bumper, and finally am now putting those on).

I converted mine soon after I bought my 2018. Not sure this stuff (v-tails, SB modules, etc.) was even available then (didn't think to try researching it)... Right away I just knew the stock setup was garbage after a few times people seemingly ignoring my signal, and so needed to do something about it (Toyota going from an amber signal (on 2nd-gen) to red while also still keeping the "3-bulb" tail config is the stupidest thing... You can barely see the damn things, especially around dusk or dawn when the tail (running) lights are also on).
I'd bet that if not for the required CHMSL, these trucks would also have an exceedingly high rate of being rearended (or maybe they do, I haven't checked).