Hey Washington Beltway bellyachers, check out this Detroit-Three innovation: Signal to turn in a new 2010 Mustang, and the tail lamps illuminate sequentially to point the way the car is turning, one-two-three from the inside to the outside. Oh, I know most of you are plenty old enough to remember the Thelma-n-Louise T-bird that launched this idea in 1965, and the '67 Mercury Cougar, '68 Shelby Mustang, and '69 Imperial that followed. But unlike those 1965-1968 versions, these involve no motors, rotating contacts, or moving parts to wear out. And get this, greenies: These new ones save fuel.

Okay, the sequential blinking doesn't save anything noticeable, but the LED lamps that are flashing (and serving tail-lamp and brake-light duty) consume 87 percent less power than the incandescent bulbs they replace. This helps save 10.5 gallons of gas per year in the typical Mustang, according to Osram, the folks who produce the system and that pioneered myriad other lighting innovations on earlier Ford/Lincoln-Mercury products. More good news: Unlike most LED signal and tail lamps you're aware of, which position an array of LEDs behind some sort of lens in a custom fitting for a particular car, the Mustang's LEDs work very much like a traditional incandescent bulb.


They're bulb-shaped, so they fit into a traditional lens and reflector housing with a push-and-turn base, drastically reducing the replacement cost of the tail lamp after crash damage (costing about half as much). They typically last the life of a vehicle and are unaffected by shock and vibration, so they're ideal in extreme applications (Pratt & Miller has used Joule lamps for three seasons of Corvette endurance racing without a failure).These so-called Joule lamps incorporate the LEDs, the thermal management (that ring sitting just behind the reflector housing), and the control circuitry (which resides in the connector).


Joule lamps cannot replace incandescent bulbs in existing applications (at least not yet), but this plug-n-play approach allows manufacturers to work LEDs into their product lines for vastly less investment cost than all those custom applications you see out there, which is why Chevy can afford to have an LED fitment on only the LTZ model of the Malibu. Joule lamps are also in use on the Ford Taurus X and the Mercury Mountaineer and Sable.


The Mustang's other Osram lighting flourish is found inside, where the MyColor dash gauge backlight color is now keyed with the rest of the interior ambient lighting, so that when you dial up ghoulish green or whorehouse red on the dash, the footwells, cupholders, etc. all glow with the flow.