bright tail lights

Nope it is just you. Your brake switch is engaged. Truck thinks you have your foot on the brake pedal.

my brake lights come on when i hit brakes. could it be the wrong bulbs?

the third brake light is on
the tail lights are really bright
The tail lighter get brighter when you apply the brake?

yeah

sounds like its really dark out or something haha...

sounds like you have a ground wire issue.
instead of the driving lights going to ground, they are grounding thru the brake light side of the bulb

i see. i'll have to check it out. i get comments about it all the time.

If your brake light is on all the time, it might be the plastic grommet on the pedal lever that lets the sensor know you have engaged the brakes. Those dry out over time and will crumble to to the ground in pieces. If you find a small pieces of clearish green rubber, than that is what it is. It happened to my 98' and also happened to my 91' 300zx.

If you have a trailer light harness, check there first. Any other aftermarket wiring work is a good place to check as well. If you don't find issues with either of those areas, I would remove each bulb and check to see if there's an issue with a bulb shorting internally.

Heath

yeah you have aftermarket wiring thats fubar. IE a LEd bar trying to bridge the running and brake lights together so the brake will work on the LED. will not work. causes you 3rd brake to be on and brake lights illuminated half assed.

thanks. i'll take a look

I have never seen a bulb short internally. Has anyone else ever seen this in person?

just looked into this last night. haha. I'm a little slow. Been really busy lately. Turned out to be problem in aftermarket trailer wiring. Someone wired the brake light into the ground, so when i hit the brakes it actually caused it to get even brighter. the only reason i actually looked into it was because i wanted to check to see if the wiring harness was working correctly and for some reason all prongs except ground were getting power with just parking lights on. Then i noticed that the white wire was grounded? haha. Then i felt the ground wire connection and it was burning hot. Theres an indication!