Originally Posted by
gunlak
i wonder how effective those with fans vs heatsinks. and also their longevity and reliabilty compared to standard halogen bulbs.
imo the led technology is catching up but we're not "there" yet. maybe in a decade itll be standard
well the LEDs themselves are rated at 50,000 hours, which is with average speed of 35mph = 1.75 million miles. I would suspect the fans would go before that, they must be rated for ~2-5 years. The heat sink only don't have fans to fail but how good are they if you stuck in traffic in Phoenix or Yuma with 120F (49C) temps outside?
I had looked into LEDs about 3 years ago, and at that point of time they were mostly for fog lights. It was more about being seen than seeing, so HIDs were better choice back then. But now they are viable alternative. For example a pair of "high performance" halogens (Sylvania Silverstar) is ~$50 at Walmart, and we paid about the same for LEDs. They will certainly last longer, in my experience Silverstars don't last more than a few month.
HIDs are still cheaper, you can get no-name kit from eBay or Amazon for <$30, but all bets off on how long they gonna last, especially if you are not getting full 12v at the ballast.
Mirage needs double filament bulbs, so finding HID kit which works well in headlight assembly will be likely as hard as finding good working LED kit. If car has projectors then it is much easier to find HID kit. And there are no true yellow LED (there are kits with yellow filters), so they probably still the choice for fog lights if you like me must have yellow fogs.
So the technology is already there, we just need a couple years to weed out bad designs and bring prices into $30-50 range, as there are still many kits selling for $100+.
Last edited by cyclopathic; 12-11-2015 at 09:36 AM.
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