Your suggestion of installing a red LED bulb unit in the left side reverse
light is exactly what I did about 4 years ago.  To offset the reduced
reverse lighting I put a  higher wattage white bulb (I forget what wattage I
used) in the right side.  About a month ago, I watched as my son drove our
'88 off into a pea souper.  That little rear fog did exactly what was
intended.  I visually lost all of the other lights at least 15 seconds
before finally losing the little rear fog light.

Good idea, if I do say so myself.

Gary
'88 Tiico 5 spd.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pensioner" <al_knoll@PACBELL.NET>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: 1989 Fog light wiring in harness?

> Thanks to Jeff@vanagonparts.com, we're farther along the trail to foglight
> wiring.  Seems the ECode rear lights have the fog lenses and as we all
> know
> the DOT rear light has a reflector in that location.  On personal
> inspection
> the ECode rear light panel (bulb holder) has an active socket in there
> WITH
> a lamp installed.
>
> The US spec wiring harness has no wire or connector that mates with that
> tab
> on the light panel.  There is also an open pin in the cylindrical
> connector
> that interfaces between the lighting harness and the chassis harness.  It
> is
> my guess that that location is the one that could be or is used to run the
> rear fog light.  I'll do a little checking on my harness to see if there
> is
> a chassis side jack element that mates with that pin.
>
> There are lots of elegant solutions to the problem.  One could replace the
> backup light on the Driver Side with an LED red lamp that will perform the
> rear fog function and add two REAL backup lights available at the local
> FLBLPS (known as fog lights) to the rear to provide the kind of lighting
> that Unca Joel has to jacklite the possums.  Possums are notoriously
> slower
> than vanagons and to avoid running over 'em when parking you gotta have
> good
> backup lights.
>
> Or add a cibie 40 rear fog light or a rectangular cibie rear fog light or
> something similar but you still have to solve the signal path.  Long ago
> hella or bosch made a nice one for Porsche. 5x8cm or such.
>
> In the interim, when foggy days happen I'll stay home and pet the cat or
> troll a weenie for the neighbor's microdog.