Changing a Tail Light in the 2004-06 Aveo Sedan

[karlexceed]

I was looking around the forum for some help doing this myself, and i noticed a lack of easy to follow instructions... So I figured it out and would like to share! Here you go:

First, open your trunk and remove the screw that you find immediately behind your tail light, in the middle of the trunk's carpet there.

Then, remove the two screws that you find on the outside of your trunk, underneath where the trunk lid would cover.

The next part gets a little tricky. There are two snaps that are still holding on to the tail light, and they are located toward the outer side of the car.



You can see that I pushed out the grommet that holds the wires, but it ended up being kind of unnecessary. Do it if you think it will help, but remember to put it back in!

The snaps that are holding the light housing in work like this, essentially:


You will need to get some fingernails behind the housing on the outside, or if you can grip with your palm on the outside of the housing to pull it... but you'll want to be pulling in these locations:


One thing that seemed to help was squeezing the ends of the snap caps inside the trunk with a pliers - it pushes the 'tab' part out slightly.

If all goes well, you should be looking at this:



And there you go! Hope that helps someone!

[richardbarry]

Hi,
Thanks for the great advice. I found that a suction cup for drain clearing pulls the unit out quite easily. It must just be positioned as high and as close to the bootlid side as possible where suction can be attained. Just give it a short, sharp tug making sure it is directly backwards and in line with the clips. Take care not to break the lens cover if the suction is too much and the clips are too tight. My suction cup let go before anything went south. I filed the clips down a bit to reduce their grip for the next time.