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2015 Highlander Upgrades

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8.3K views 18 replies 9 participants last post by  FlyFL1PgUy99  
#1 ·
Just recently purchased a 2015 Highlander LE back in March for a decent price with 82k miles on it. After a few days and seeing the rear lights, from the later 3rd gen led models I decided to look into upgrading the lights to the 2017-2019 version. This took quite a bit of research as I couldn't find much on anyone detailing this sort of change. Since I couldn't find any info on this type of change, what I did was look up the corresponding parts that would be used for the tail light on a model to model comparison.

The one big difference was only the reverse lights where the led for the parking light is a 3 pin connector for 2017-2019 MY vs 2 pin for the early MY. After looking through form the lift gate wiring harness I saw that they share the same 3 connector plug above the headliner I verified this through the parts Toyota site and the connection pins matched up.
The Brake light assembly were plug and play as the assemblies came with their own harness.

In this journey I also went ahead and replaced the original headlamps that already were foggy and yellowish with new factory headlights.
I wanted to also add fogs but was weary about the aftermarket products and didn't know which to go with. So I went ahead and looked for the factory housing for the fogs, in my hast I picked up a set that had the dry which I didn't notice but didn't want to go through the return process so just kept it.
For the fog lights themselves I again looked at the factory options Toyota provided, and found that the 2018 Tundra led fogs match up perfectly on the factory housing slots.

while waiting for parts that were on backorder from the dealer I went ahead and purchased some a set of H11 Led light from GTR Lighting, Turn signal lens and interior led's for the passenger and cargo areas as well as led puddle lights, to balance everything out. All in all I was finally able to get everything install on Wed, headlights and fogs needed some aligning to get just right and to be honest I am quite happy with how everything turned out.

Here is the before:


After:
 
#18 ·
AvgModGuy that looks awesome! I've always wanted to do that same tail light swap on my 2015 XLE. I follow you where the outside tail lights (brake lights) are plug and play with their own harness. And I follow you that the inner tail lights (backup/parking lights) have the 3 prong connection vs the 2 prong. How exactly did you solve that. Did you replace with a newer harness from 2017, or did you cut and crimp new 3 prong adapters? If you cut and crimped, how did you go from 2 wire to 3 wire?