A few months ago I decided to take my 12V energy savings one step further especially after receiving news of improved high intensity LED die manufacturing. Anyway, I looked around and found a few suppliers eager to sell me a couple of units apparently suited for headlight use.

These new bulbs are manufactured with 1W LED dies and they vary in design as well as quality. The prices have come down but depending on the quality they can still remain north of $30 per bulb.

Here are the new bulbs I ordered & tested:


On the left you have the 9005 bulb. For those of you who may find it difficult to determine the actual number of LED dies on the bulb the count is 18.

On the right you have the 9006 bulb and it has a single 1W LED die. Obviously, this last one is totally inadequate for lighting duties and even thought it is pretty bright when looked at head-on, it provides no discernible illumination whatsoever. This is what I would call strictly a "bling" light.

The following picture shows my car with the 9005 bulbs on. These are the DRL lights and are ON all day long... and as you can tell they are not too dim at all. If visibility of the vehicle is what DRL's is supposed to address, then this bulb has some potential.
The outer lights is where the 9006 would have gone, and those lights are driver activated for normal night-time driving (they are off in this picture).



Side note:
I had to "machine" the neck of the 9005 bulb to shrink it from 22mm to 20mm so that it could fit in the lens orifice. I found this very annoying since I had never before seen bulb packagings so "out of spec". It was not too hard to do it, but I nevertheless applied some caution by covering the LED array with some masking tape before removing the material from the neck with some sand paper.

Living with the LED lighting:

Well, one thing for sure: I could not live with the 9006 (single die LED). Totally useless for me.
I could however live with the 9005 DRL replacement bulbs! In fact, I did OK for roughly 2+ weeks. The only "problem", if I can call it that, is that these LED bulbs are totally useless for illuminating a target (not that the regular halogen bulbs do much better either when in DRL mode).

They are quite visible all right, especially when looked at head on, but they do absolutely nothing else for the driver other than draining less power and producing almost zero heat. This is the big attraction point in my view.

As you can tell, they produce a VERY white light and almost resemble an HID setup. The combined DRL operating power for these two bulbs is 18 watts. When operating with the high beams on the the total power is 36W. By comparison, the regular halogen bulbs would be foot printed at 55 watts and 110W respectively.

So from a power saving perspective they have potential and that is what I wanted to test.

One other thing I should note: When I had either (and both) the 9005 and 9006 bulbs installed, the DRL warning light (on the instrument cluster) would be on all the time. This is because these LED bulbs failed to cause the expected load and that prompted the system to report a problem with the lighting. Normally, we would see this warning if a bulb had blown or failed.

However, I did not get used to the DRL warning at all. I even tried taping over the warning light but the darn thing glows around the tape and ended up being a subjective "no-go" for me.
I did see a bit of a positive impact in terms of the power drain but I doubt that would be noticeable by most people. In fact, the power savings although good, were not enough to sway my assessment of the overall benefits for now.

Verdict:
These bulbs are not for me. At least not yet. Perhaps one day I will think of a way to defeat the DRL warning light without installing a "load" resistor for each bulb, but until then I have other lower hanging fruit to focus on.

I have removed the bulbs from my car and I may sell them to anyone who asks or is considering getting a set cheap just to try them out. Again, keep in mind that much of what I have said is highly subjective and may differ from other people's opinions


Cheers;

MSantos

 

Wow, M looks like you are having fun with your car. Thanks for the write-up.

Did you consider LEDs in other areas?

You may get the same warning for side-mirror and tail-lights, but what about cabin lights?

 

Hey MSantos... nice write-up. It's interesting to see how these bulbs are progressing. I love my 9006 HIDs and could not see replacing (at this point) with the 1W single LED 9006. You mention a lot about how the 9005 DRLs look during the day, but did not mention (or I did not pick up on an inference) how they work for the actual high beams at night. Any comments?

 

M, you are one of my favorite people on the internet. I highly enjoy your posts and analysis. Thanks for the info, very interesting.

 

Good report Msantos. I would have trouble with that warning as well. Did you try these bulbs at night? H

 

Nice write up. I have started to see these types of LED retrofit bulbs coming to market, but have not seen many that are superior to the incandescent bulbs that they replace.

Headlights will be available on new cars in the next 2 years, but it questionable if the retrofits will ever be useful. The LED lights use completely different lens reflector designs.

I tried LED bulbs for the tail lights, but pulled them all out except for the license plate bulbs. The others were not bright enough and had a strange color to them. The license plate lamp does look good, and looks like the bulbs in the new Lexus cars.

OEM LED lights are going to be great.

 

OE:
Do you have a pic of your LEDs?

 

I kept interior Dome LEDS, as well as the trunk and license plate light. My only other project may be to add some courtesy lights...

I agree that the license light looks really nice. I'll try to add a picture of mine if I get a chance!

 

Thanks for the feedback & input folks.

I'll try to address most of the questions in a single swing if I can.

- These bulbs (including the 9005 DRL part) are very poor at providing night time illumination. My recommendation is to forget about converting your car to all LED. IMO, it won't work. However, at least the 9005 will work well as a DRL bulb since the point of a DRL headlight is NOT to illuminate but rather to be seen.

- What I have concluded after my research into the current LED based bulbs is that the bulb design plays a very important role in its effectiveness. I have since also ordered additional LED based bulbs for all four corners of the car. This includes marker and stop lights. I did not consider dome, trunk and license plate bulbs yet as I am more concerned about reducing the load on the 12V system than I am on the "look" side of things.

As some of you have stated, LED based tech has come a long way already and I would say that the DRL replacement bulb (9005) is here already. The design works and when looking at it carefully the only thing missing is the car's ability to "recognize" it. As a matter of fact the only reason I've pulled the 9005's out is because of the annoying DRL warning, otherwise it would have been a good fit for what I was looking for.


The way I see it, the 12V system often acts like a little "black hole" for the expensive energy contained in the battery pack. Tie that to the fact that the HCH-II pack is not that big at all, and you can begin seeing that there are downstream improvements that will benefit FE. Of course, if you drive mostly highway then this may be of lesser concern to you, but for those of us driving mostly in city routine the pack health is a big determinant in achieving better FE.
In any case, you may wish to add the total wattage radiated by the stock bulbs in the car, just for giggles. Amazing numbers are they not, especially when in Auto-stop for extended periods of time?

Cheers;

MSantos

 

The new Lexus LS460h has LED headlights. Those are really bright, but I wonder what the bulbs look like and how much each one is. The LS460h has three projectors from what it looks like. These use less wattage than HID too.