As you are probably well aware of, Detroit Speed & Engineering is a world-renowned automotive shop that also develops and manufacturers their own line of bad ass custom products. At this year’s PRI show, Detroit Speed announced a new electric headlight door kit for 1968-’82 Chevrolet Corvettes. We stopped by their exhibit to get some details on it.

The Detroit Speed kit retains the factory linkage.

As you may well be aware, the vacuum system that operates the popup headlights on the C3 Corvette was woefully inadequate, even when they were brand new. And over the years, things tended to just get worse and worse until you were driving around with a winking Corvette and no lights. Now Detroit Speed has a kit, similar to its very popular Camaro RS headlight kits, that eliminate all of the vacuum operated stuff with brand new electronics.

And the best part is the kit is plug-n-play. All you do is connect the new wiring harness to the controller that comes with the kit and then plug it into the original headlight switch. After that, you’ve got yourself a set of modern operating headlights.

You can manually open the headlights as well in the unlikely case that the electric motors fail with the red knob seen in this image.

When installed, the kit drastically improves reliability, smoothness, and timing when compared to stock. Andy Kralovic from Detroit Speed tells us “It takes about a half of a day to install, but is pretty easy. It is pretty much plug and play with very little wiring.” It directly replaces the stock vacuum actuated system, bolts right into the factory linkage, and requires no permanent modifications to your ‘Vette. The doors can still be manually opened and closed for maintenance and cleaning.

DSE makes these electric headlight door kits for many vehicles, including the C2 Corvette as well.

Here you can see the control box that typically mounts in the car under the dash.