tail light fuse keeps blowing

There must be a dead short somewhere along the wiring. Unfortunately, troubleshooting and locating where the problem is can be difficult and time consuming.

The dealer's approach is often to replace the entire wiring harness on the affected circuit, at significant expense.

 

Easy thing you can do is check the bulb sockets to see if there is water or if the sockets have melted which could cause the short.

I've seen several posts here and I've had two gen 3 Prius that have had the license plate bulb sockets melt until they were nonfunctional. Never turned into a shorting situation though.

 

Just been going through the same problem. It seems that when a bulb burns out instead of that bulb not working on the other lights work fine, Toyota has decided that it's better to Short the circuit and blow the 10 amp fuse labeled tail light under the drivers feet. After searching and changed bulbs it would last a little while then would happen again. After much research and the help of a mechanic at a near by Toyota dealer I was able to get a schematic of what lights are attached to this fuse.

There are 4 lights in the front.
2 bulbs in each of the headlight assembly.
1 bulb sticks straight up above the low beam light. The other bulb is where the yellow section of the headlight is on the side. This is hard to get to. I had to take out the whole headlight assembly to get to it maybe you will have better luck.
The license plate bulb in the tail has 2 lights and of coarse the brake light assembly has the red LED lights inside.

I had to change 2 license plate bulbs and the 2 front lights and finally it was fixed. This whole process started back in May and finally is completed today.

I figured I would pass along my experience to hopefully help you not have to spend $180 at a Toyota dealer to change a $3 bulb like I did.

Good luck

 

Hello, just curious what was the outcome of this issue? I'm having the exact same problem.

 

just curious if you could give an update. Did the problem ever return? I'm having the exact same issue.