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Installing LED Lights in a Classic Car: LED lighting can add a lot of safety to your classic car or truck and look great doing it.

- Steven Rupp

Trickle-down tech is just about how everything works these days. First the high-end rides get it, and over time it migrates to even the cheaper cars. Remember ABS? It started in the exotics, and now every car has it. The same is true of LED lighting. At first it was on the top-shelf cars, but now it’s common place. And for good reason—it just works better than incandescent bulbs. Today, the aftermarket makes it easy to get modern LED lights into your classic car. In general, cars today travel at higher average speeds compared to the good old days, and more speed means people have less time to react to the car in front of them. This makes installing LED lights in a classic car a really good idea.

01 Compared to modern LED lights, the bulb-based lights in our classics aren’t nearly as bright. With this 1969 Camaro only one panel out of three on each side comes on when you hit the brakes. With so many distracted drivers, this is often found to be insufficient. And while we’re talking fractions of a second, the newer LEDs light up much faster, giving the person behind you just a bit more time to react.

02 Thanks to the aftermarket, there are quite a few options for getting modern LED lighting into your classic car. We got this Digi-Tails kit from Summit Racing for our 1969 Camaro. They offer a standard version (uses the factory reverse bulb), one for the RS (all three panels LED and no reverse light), and the one we chose, which has red in all three panels as well as LED backup lights. Several other companies, such as United Pacific, offer lights for various cars, but we chose Digi-Tails from Summit since they had the backup light option.