I don't drive my car at night, so I never looked at changing the lighting, but I have played around with LED lighting in other cars. I've also been messing with LED taillight bulbs.
The kits are all over the place. Some are poorly engineered. Some actually draw more power than the stock bulbs on the high beam setting and not much of a power reduction on low beam. The focal points differ between different manufacturers even on the same bulb, meaning some will glare more than others.
None of the OEM's do LED lighting this way. (at least none i'm aware of) OEM's do direct projection LED, for head and taillight, with some secondary reflection. Aftermarkets are the only ones doing the primarily reflector style setups. Some LED's are better than others. There are no standards, no 3rd party checking the claims of lumens and current and such. They really are all over the place with no real standardization being make by offshore companies as cheap as possible.
So keep that in mind when searching for a kit. I've only investigated rear brake lights, but I had to buy LED's from 5-6 different vendors to actually find an LED bulb equal to the OEM incandescent bulb. The other vendors were dimmer. Unfortunately everyone assumed LED= brighter. Not the case.
For the headlights, a projector setup would be ideal, even with LED or HID lighting. One of these days i'll play around with lighting on my car, just to eliminate that ugly yellow light on the rare occasions that I do put on the headlights. For that reason, one day I might look into a drop in LED bulb, just for looks
The kits are all over the place. Some are poorly engineered. Some actually draw more power than the stock bulbs on the high beam setting and not much of a power reduction on low beam. The focal points differ between different manufacturers even on the same bulb, meaning some will glare more than others.
None of the OEM's do LED lighting this way. (at least none i'm aware of) OEM's do direct projection LED, for head and taillight, with some secondary reflection. Aftermarkets are the only ones doing the primarily reflector style setups. Some LED's are better than others. There are no standards, no 3rd party checking the claims of lumens and current and such. They really are all over the place with no real standardization being make by offshore companies as cheap as possible.
So keep that in mind when searching for a kit. I've only investigated rear brake lights, but I had to buy LED's from 5-6 different vendors to actually find an LED bulb equal to the OEM incandescent bulb. The other vendors were dimmer. Unfortunately everyone assumed LED= brighter. Not the case.
For the headlights, a projector setup would be ideal, even with LED or HID lighting. One of these days i'll play around with lighting on my car, just to eliminate that ugly yellow light on the rare occasions that I do put on the headlights. For that reason, one day I might look into a drop in LED bulb, just for looks
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