VLEDS Plug-and-Play Bed Light Kit

Intro
Hello TW! First off thanks again for the continued support on all of the projects I’ve been apart of over the past couple of years! I’d like to announce another collaboration I did with VLEDS that’s been in the works for almost a year. We have come up with the ultimate bed lighting kit that is designed specifically for the Tacoma and Tundra platforms. This kit is fully plug-and-play, comes with 4 custom-made bed lights, seamless wire hiders, and integrates very nicely into the truck bed and the truck’s factory wiring.



Function
The concept for the wiring harness took me quite a bit of time to fully nail-down. The harness plugs into your factory cargo-light switch near the dash and allows the following functionality for controlling the bed lights utilizing the factory switch:

ON Position
When the cargo switch is ON the new bed lights turn on along with the cargo light (this isn’t impressive)

DOOR
When the cargo switch is in DOOR mode the bed lights and the cargo light will turn on when you open any door. BUT WAIT THERES MORE — the bed lights and cargo light will also turn on when you drop the tailgate! This is made possible by a custom-made pin switch that mounts to a factory hole near the tailgate. No drilling. The tailgate control will only work when the switch is in DOOR mode — so essentially your tailgate will now function like one of the doors. Back-feeding the cargo light itself provides a bit of overhead lighting in addition to the lights under the bed rail when you drop the tailgate.

OFF
When the cargo light switch is in the OFF position, the cargo light and bed lights will not function. This includes dropping the tailgate. It took a while for me to figure out how to make this work. What this means is you can remove the tailgate while the switch is OFF and drive around town without lighting up like a Christmas tree.



Harness:



Pin switch:


Lights
The lights for this kit were designed from the ground-up and are specifically geared for bed lighting. The aluminum housing is very durable and the LEDs are pitched at an angle to direct light into your bed and not into your fender well. The kit comes with a wire hider that matches the geometry of the light — so that the whole kit just looks like a little beveled piece of moulding running under your bed rail. Note these are prototypes without the final smooth powder coating and premium lens:





Compatibility
The kit works with 3rd Gen DC Tacomas with or without factory bed lighting. If you install this kit without the factory bed lighting kit it’ll function like it should from the factory + some. The kit also works on the previous generation Tundra (2010-2021). I made the harness a little long to accommodate the big boy long bed crew cab. We will make a separate kit for the 4th Gen Tacoma and current Gen Tundra shortly after the 4th Gen drops — I’ve already started dissecting what I can.

Ordering -- Pre-orders are currently live!
Kits will retail for $220. Each kit includes:

• 4x Bed Lights
• 1x Extra-long relay harness that mounts behind the tail light w/ a supplied nut
• 1x Plug-and-Play cargo light harness that plugs into the OEM cargo light switch
• 1x Roll of wire hider with 3M adhesive (roll is long enough to cut as you prefer)
• 1x Pin-switch with factory-style grommet to mount by the tailgate
• 1x Pack of zip-ties

You can now pre-order from these vendors!

• VLEDS (direct)
• Hotshot Offroad
• TacomaBeast (they will have a custom-branded kit released at the same time)

Installed Photos (Prototypes; more coming):


Installation Instructions
Click here

 

@memario1214

 

Dang, looks awesome!

 

Nice work

 

Looks great, will there be different colors available? Thanks. I’ve always purchase vled products and their customer service is great.

 

What I don’t understand, and I hope someone will educate me, but how is it these things typically are static in their color options while some cheap LED thing my girlfriend gets is any color she sets?

 

I’m interested. Looks like you have a great product here.

 

Will there be an option to operate the lights by a switch in the bed?

 

I like the idea of a light front at the cab and back near the tailgate ... unless I misread the last the picture. 4 lights in the kit or just one kit per side, 2 kits total for the bed?

I cannot help but remember people wanting a reliable pin-switch for under-hood lights. Not sure if people would pay for just that tailgate pin-switch marketed as compatible with the hood lights. Just thinking ...

 

The pin switch on this is really cool. Or so I’ve been told if I’m not supposed to talk about it….?
It replaces the little rubber bumper. Really clean. The whole lot looks great.

It’s kind of that “do one thing really well, or do a lot of things half-ass”. The lights VLEDs uses are a specific shade of white (or red, or amber) and can be made very bright and dependable as the operating voltage is much more fixed. Where as RGB lights A) require controllers and don’t produce the same brightness at the same power levels, and B) don’t actually produce a good white light. They make RBGW lights, but then you are getting 4 inferior diodes occupying the space that one superior diode could be taking.

Maybe we can all try to talk @kmorgan3 into developing a hood light kit with VLED next? These bed lights would also make great hood lights, so seems like part of the work is already done

 

I wonder where he got the ideas...
3rd GEN Added Lamps to Cargo SW

 

I'm interested.

 

Like @Puppypunter mentioned: when you swap to an RGBW chip the emitter is cut into 4ths and your output diminishes. One option is to increase the size of the emitter by 4x, but I’m sure you can see what that would do to the footprint of the light. I’m all for having a disco in your truck bed, but these are designed to be more functional

I can run it by the team — I know that I could add an override switch to the harness, but it would require a small modification to the harness. The goal of the auto tailgate trigger was to eliminate the need for a switch, so we’ll kick it around a bit and get back to you.

First part: There are 4 lights in total and all designed to run along the sides. However, the harness is over built on purpose so that you can add more to your liking. Second part: A hood kit is a good idea! I’m pretty sure the pin switch will be available a la carte, but I’ll see if we can’t make something specifically for one of the hood holes so it’s a better fit.

For the initial launch it’ll just be white as it’s taken longer than expected to get the kits together, but I can see some utility in having red or a red/white switchback

 

Ah ok that makes a lot of sense.
Man these look nice.

 

Really nice work! I'll have to double check but as long as it will work with my tonneau, I would be interested for sure. It looks like the tonneau relocated my track to just above the tie down loop at the front of the bed. Will the lights be mounted that far forward?

Would be nice to have in addition to my factory bed lights. Would the factory bed lights be able to tie into the "door" (on-with-tailgate) mode? I'm sure they could if I did some splicing but would be cool if there was a way they worked like that out of the box by changing the order in which each harness and light plugs in.

Also interested in the pin switch (especially one for an underhood setup) - I need something better for my hood lights. I'm currently operating off of a manual switch, which is fine until I forget it, which I have done thrice. I'm using a set of KC cyclone V2s which are great but if VLED had an option, I could consider them. Main thing is the existing pin switches on the market are all garbage, which is why I'm all manual for now. If VLEDS came up with a switch for the under hood area, I would 100% buy it the day it was released.

Great job!

 

What’s the extra work looking like to add this to an access cab?

 

You would need to adapt the main harness to a single pole double throw switch that I have a prototype for if you want 100% capability. I’m not sure that version will make it into production, though. A stripped-down version with a dedicated switch and the pin switch could be a good solution for ACs.

 

If you have the factory bed lights then they are already enslaved to the cargo light switch, so any time your new lights are on they will back-feed the factory lights. Our test rig has the factory lights.

 

I would be in on purchasing whatever solution you deem to be best for a AC, even if it wasn’t directly plug and play and required a bit of work.

 

Wondering if this will be compatible with Bakflip's X4S? Bakflip lowers the oem rails with their covers.