This Guy Added ESP32-Controlled Taillights to His Electric Porsche Project

There is a gentleman on YouTube, going by the “Electric SuperCar” channel name, that is in the process of building his own electric supercar based on a second-generation Porsche Cayman (981) chassis. It should be obvious that that is a massively ambitious undertaking, but he has been making some impressive progress. A big part of the build is the design and fabrication of custom parts, and that includes bodywork like the bumpers. A couple of months ago, he 3D-printed a custom rear bumper and then he used an ESP32 development board to add tailligh

If this guy was lazy, he would have just selected and mounted existing taillights that are already being manufactured for other car models. That’s a surprisingly common strategy followed by many boutique and exotic automakers. Identifying such repurposed taillights is even a favorite pastime of car enthusiasts. But as his YouTube channel clearly proves, this fella doesn’t have a lazy bone in his body. Like with the bumper itself, he wanted the taillights to be unique and to set his DIY electric supercar apart from every other Porsche Cayman on the road. So, he designed and built his own LED taillights.

The taillight design resembles that of many cars on the market today that take advantage of LEDs to create shapes that wouldn’t have been practical in the days of incandescent bulbs. Specifically, this is a strip of RGB LEDs running the entire width of the bumper. They can act as running lights, brake lights, turn signals, hazards, and so on. They can even show animated effects of questionable street legality.

From an electronics standpoint, this is actually a pretty simple project. It consists of an ESP32 development board, a strip of WS2182B NeoPixel-style individually addressable RGB LEDs, and a buck converter to provide power. It is set up to pull from the 12V system, which electric cars retain for compatibility with existing accessories. That hardware attaches to a standard perf board.

The sketch, coded and uploaded through the Arduino IDE, illuminates the LEDs depending on the selected mode (like braking or reversing). It isn’t clear yet what the plan is to change modes while driving, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to integrate the taillights into the rest of the car’s systems with a CAN (Common Area Network) bus module. Right now, each mode is assigned to activate when specific IO pins are pulled low, so they could even work with conventional switches.

The taillights already look great and the plan is to order custom PCBs to give the project some polish.