Adding LED tailights to the HCH-II

A local group of HCH-II owners agreed to review a set of HCH-II tail lights that run mostly on high intensity LED arrays. These tail lights are complete assemblies that match the size of the OEM tail lights and only use a single stock incandescent bulb used for the backup light. The remaining light clusters are strictly LED based and the complete units are OEM plug and play.

Oh, yes. These units are DOT approved too. Here's a sample:

The candidate units will be Altezza, APC and ANZO branded and we will report on how they perform in terms of power usage. We expect these to perform as well as the OEM units in terms of lighting effectiveness, but we are not sure if these will actually consume less power. As you may know, the upcoming Toyota Prius has this feature and so does the 2009 Honda Insight. For good reasons, LED tail lights are expected to save a few percent in nominal energy over the more traditional lighting.

We have ours fingers crossed... as these tail light units are very expensive roughly $250 to $400 so we hope they work. If they don't, well... at least they will look OK.