How to Replace Taillights 2003-08 Toyota Matrix

Okay, friends, to get started on our rear tail lens, we obviously need to get inside the hatch. Once you're in there, we're going to come right to the side. You're going to find this little push thing. Remove this cover. Right behind here, you're going to be able to see where your mounting bolts are. One of them is going to be fairly easy to see. The other two might be behind the plastic, but if you just use a nice ratcheting wrench, you'll probably be able to easily access all of them. If you were to look right here where the wiring is, you can see that there's an area that goes over a stud. We need to get that off so we can remove the mounting nut. Use your 10-millimeter. Remove this nut. There's going to be another one that's located right behind here. It's easy to access right through this area here. Right up top, pretty much at this diagonal angle, it's going to be right there. There's only three mounting nuts. Go ahead and remove them all. Spin that right off of there. There we are. Now that we have all those off, let's remove our wiring right here. If you look right where my thumb is, there's a little push tab. Give it a squeeze, and then draw this away. Take a peek. Make sure there's no funny colors. Set that aside. Now, we just need to get this off of the vehicle. You could try to pull on it, see if it wants to break free. If it doesn't, just use a nice plastic trim tool so you don't mar up your paint. I'm going to come right along here because it's not someplace that's easily visible. I'm just going to try to pry this away from the vehicle a little bit. Here we are. Pull it right away, there it is, friends.

Now, it's going to be time to get our new lamp mounted into the vehicle. Make sure that you have this out and ready. We're going to slide it right through the hole, then we're going to line up those three mounting studs through the holes as well, and just carefully go ahead and slide this in. Now that we have the lamp in, we're going to put on our three mounting bolts. I like to start them all on, and then we'll go ahead and snug them up. Just make sure you hold that lens from the backside so it doesn't fall out of the vehicle. Okay. Let's go ahead and snug them now. Okay. Feels like it bottomed out right there. Just going to give it a tiny bit more, and then I'll move along. Okay. That's bottomed out. Teeny bit more. Now, the next thing we need to do is get this bracket off of our old assembly. I'm going to use a Phillips head screwdriver here. Remove the mounting screw. Set that aside because we're going to be reusing it. And next, we need to get this off of here. You're going to see there's a little push clip prong there. We're going to have to push on that a little bit and then draw this away. Press right there. Okay. Let's transfer this over to the new assembly. Okay. So, we have our piece. The way we want to hold it is just like this, so it's going to be sitting facing up like that. Put it right on there. Put it just like that so it's lined up. Now, we're going to take our screw, and we're going to put it right in there. Snug it up. Okay. That's nice and tight. Let's connect our wiring harness, click it in, give it a nice tug. Make sure it's secure. The next thing we need to do is if you look right along where my index finger is, you can see there's some slots. They need to fit right over this. Slide it right in. Should click in. And then, of course, we've got our wiring. Put that onto the stud. Everything is nice and secure. Let's put our cover on. All right. Let's test these bulbs. We've got brake, reverse, running lights, directional. Perfect.