When I was shopping for my Denali I considered asking the dealer, along with the purchase, if there was any way to find a different stock bumper for the truck that does not have those integrated steps in the corners. I thought they were so ugly, and with the multipro tail gate, pretty much useless. But I've come around on them, mainly because they are a great place to add some rear lighting to the truck! I've always wanted to add flush mounted LED pods to the back of my truck to get some better backup lighting, but I was never willing to cut anything that expensive, but these bumper step inserts are pretty cheap and easy to replace, so I decided it was time to try this out.
The stock backup lights, as is the case on most vehicles, are great for indicating to others that you are backing up, not so great at actually lighting up what's behind you. a bit of light sure, but not really enough. I found that the backup camera would even reduce its frame rate to around 10fps in low light so it could still provide somewhat decent video quality, what it needed was just more light!
This project integrates some bright LED pods into the step pockets, plus a set of flood lights (actually flush mount rock lights) which cast extra fill light behind and casts some light to the sides making it easier to see what's where when close to other objects like in the garage. I added a small pair of lights to illuminate the rear wheel area in the event of a road side problem and just for fun, some extra running lights...just because I thought they would look nice (they do!)
The lights operate off the reverse lights, cargo lights, or parking lights, each one with its own functionality. The harness uses a Curt trailer harness and a Putco LED blade harness together to access all the signals and high capacity power from the trailer wiring to run the much brighter backup lights.

02:02 Design Running Lights
03:48 Design Light Pod Mounts
04:21 First round of 3D printing
04:48 Modifying the step pockets for ligfhts
16:41 Installing the running lights
18:32 Junction boxes for connections
20:05 Finalizing the integration of the mounts to the step pockets
22:38 Pre install test
22:59 Install
25:31 Trying it out