Automotive: Peugeot vehicle interior lighting
The brief
Since 2018, Unitop has supplied the LED strip for the main interior lights of Peugeot vehicles, built to order for an automotive customer in Portugal. The strip sits behind the cabin lenses you see in the roof: the large panel beside the sunroof and the central dome light above the front seats.
A car is a harder place for LED strip than a building. The supply is nominally 12V, but it is never steady. Starting the engine and running everything else on the vehicle pull it up and down, which is why the cabin lights of older cars dipped every time the engine turned over. The customer needed a light that stays steady and does not flicker through all of that, at a volume of tens of thousands of vehicle sets a year.
What we supplied
Unitop supplies a custom SMD 2835 LED strip at 60 LEDs per meter, built as a constant-current 12V strip with circuit protection on the board. That combination is what handles the vehicle supply: the strip works normally anywhere from 9V to 15V, with no flicker.
Each piece is 8.4 ft (2.55 m) long, one piece per vehicle set. The terminals and the wire foam are the customer’s own parts, shipped to us from overseas and fitted in production, so every piece arrives ready for the customer’s assembly line. The bare strip runs at 10000K, a very cool white chosen so that the light comes out at about 6000K once it passes through the lens.
Automotive parts also need paperwork. Every material in the strip had to be declared in IMDS, the automotive industry’s material data system, and preparing that submission took about a month before production could start.
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Product | Custom SMD 2835 LED strip, 60 LEDs/m |
| Voltage | 12V constant current, with circuit protection |
| Operating range | 9V to 15V on the vehicle supply, no flicker |
| Color temperature | 10000K bare; about 6000K through the lens |
| Piece length | 8.4 ft (2.55 m), one per vehicle set |
| Connection | Customer-supplied terminals and wire foam, fitted in production |
| Protection | IP20, inside the cabin lamp housing |
| Compliance | Material data declared in IMDS |
| Volume | About 40,000 sets a year, about 328,000 ft (100,000 m) |
| Location | Portugal |
| Status | In production since 2018, ongoing |
The result
Getting there took time. The production team spent six months working through the build with the customer and ran two trial batches before every issue was solved. Since then, production has run smoothly: about 40,000 vehicle sets a year, roughly 328,000 ft (100,000 m) of strip, and the program is still running.
For anyone building LED strip into a product rather than a room, the lesson is the same as in this program: fix the supply range, the light color behind your lens and the parts you will supply yourself before the first trial run, and plan for the documentation your industry asks for. Send us those details and we will build a sample to your spec.
