Thanks to LEDtronics, Inc. for providing us with strips of LED lighting!

LEDtronics’ mission is “To Replace Energy Wasting Lighting With World Class Environmentally Responsible LED bulbs and Products”. Read more about them on their About Us page.

We can use these as turn signals and brake lights on our car after covering them in gels which will change their color, or leave them white and use them as accent lighting to make our car more visible in traffic (like the beautiful Audi DRLs). Because they are so thin, it will be easy to fit them where they need to go on our car, specifically the front and back edges of the array, where the profile of the car is very skinny. Also, being LEDs, they consume very little power, which make them perfect for us since our car needs to be extremely smart with energy. We’ll definitely write another blog post once we create our light housings and install these lights onto our new car.

The LEDs are very bright, and hurt to look at after a while in an average lit room. We got 3 types: 6-LED bars (pictured on the right), 3-LED bars (same as the 6-LED bars but half-width), and 6″ bars (pictured on the left). Although the 6″ bars have many more LEDs than the others, each individual LED is a bit less powerful, so the overall brightness is similar. In fact, those are a little darker.

Also, we could shine these on our array to charge our car, but it would just end up draining our batteries since much of the energy would be lost, primarily due to the solar cells which are only about 20-25% efficient.

Again, thanks, LEDtronics!