Ahh. Looks familiar. A dealer in the PNW installed one of these (without our knowledge) in a Honda CRV we purchased. Something about anti theft and vehicle recovery by finance, for all the cars on their lot.
The car had all sorts of crazy power problems. Smart display would randomly crash, interior lights wouldn’t work, just… flakey.
Called the dealer and demanded they remove this. Electrical problems went away instantly.
They put them in so that they can use a single key fob to open up all the cars in the lot. There's a socket that accepts a module. When they sell the car, they pop out their key fob module and pop in the "security system" blinking LED module and try to upsell you $1K for the privilege of having your wire harness butchered.
This is the most accurate answer in this thread. Toyota dealers in Northern California did this to me twice on new cars. (A third party autosound guy removed it and fixed the harness for me)
Even though we always pay in full for cars, the dealer has you talk to the finance guy who will try to sell you useless addons like undercoating and an “alarm system” which has already been butchered into the car by the dealer. (If you buy it they would stick a key module with a blinking red light under the dash somewhere, but most of the circuit is already there.)
On a new car? No. In fact the Toyota owner's manual warned against after-market undercoatings. The dealer was trying to do something that the manufacturer warned against.
That's pretty wild that this is sold as aftermarket. This is baked into VAG & BMW car products for at least the last 12 years, and it was on my 2015 S1000XR, but it'll only activate under hard braking scenarios. I don't know if i'd want this to activate for every brake press, at least here in the UK i've gotten used to the idea flashing brake lights = car ahead is braking very hard.
Flashing brake lights in certain circumstances are required in the EU (Uniform provisions concerning the approval of vehicles with regard to the installation of lighting and light-signalling devices 2016/1723), although the linked brake light flashers seem to be unlawful as they flash on onset of braking rather than extreme braking force.
I've never seen flashing brake lights, but indicators flash on very hard braking. It first showed up on the first-gen Citroën C5, and was copied by everyone else after that. On the C5, it was part of the "emergency brake assist", which would basically work out that if you were doing an emergency stop, you really wanted to throw out the anchors and dump all the hydraulic pressure into the brakes.
Ahh you’re right - it’s hazards that flash, it’s not the brake lights.
OT: I was wondering if you were gordonjcp of scotlug fame (i don’t expect you’d remember me, i used to attend / was briefly active circa 2002-2004) but the mention of Citroen sealed it :-) hope you’re well!
It was yeah, i was at GU so Livvy felt like a sneak peek behind the scenes of how the other half lived. I remember getting loads of help writing my first linux kernel module in the Counting House with a bunch of folks huddled over my laptop :-D good memories.
I discovered it when my new car started having the same issues you saw.
NOTE: it's somewhere between a scam and a crappy business practice. Here in southern california it's by no means only used cars or shady financing. The dealers install them on all the cars to keep track of their own inventory. Then they try to sell it to you as a kind of lojack for $$$$. If you are smart and decline, they just deactivate the unit (stop paying for the service), but do you think that they remove it? or repair the wiring?
The car had all sorts of crazy power problems. Smart display would randomly crash, interior lights wouldn’t work, just… flakey.
Called the dealer and demanded they remove this. Electrical problems went away instantly.
Super frustrating.