The lighting on your vehicle is one of its most important safety features. Not only does it increase your ability to see at night, but it also indicates important signals while driving. For decades, most vehicles have used halogen bulbs in all lighting applications. These bulbs are quickly becoming obsolete due to the rise of automotive LED bulbs. If you are looking for the best LED bulbs on the market, look no further.
To understand what makes LED bulbs so effective, we need to start by looking at a halogen bulb. Halogen bulbs produce their light using a glowing filament much like a common incandescent light bulb. The main difference is that the glowing filament is encased in a pocket of halogen gas. This gas helps to form a halogen reaction, picking up the tungsten that evaporates from the filament by forming a salt and redepositing it once the temperature of the tungsten halogen salt becomes hot enough.
This halogen reaction helps to extend the lifespan of these bulbs, though operating under such extreme temperatures will eventually fatigue the bulb beyond saving and your automotive halogen bulbs will fail, typically after 400 to 1000 hours of use.
By contrast, LEDs, or light emitting diodes, create light using the movement of electrons across a semiconductor. The process is slightly more complicated than a hot piece of metal glowing, but we’ll try to make it simple. Basically the LED has two sides and one side has several holes which electrons can fit into. As electrons travel across the diode and squeeze into these electron holes, they shed some of their energy in the form of light.
This process is one of the most efficient ways to produce light, with significantly less power used to produce the same amount of light as a halogen bulb. This is because LEDs emit light in a narrow band focusing on the visible spectrum of light. Halogen bulbs, on the other hand, produce large amounts of high wavelength infrared light. This light is not only invisible to our eyes, and therefore useless for visibility, but it can also produce a lot of heat.
For these reasons, LEDs are more efficient than halogen bulbs when it comes to looking at light production versus power consumption, but what does that mean for drivers? While the largest benefit is clearly the ability to achieve a greater light output. This means that when you install a pair of our automotive LED bulbs in your vehicle, you will be able to see further and drive safer. You also won’t have to replace your bulb as often as LED bulbs have a lifespan of 40,000 hours.
One of the biggest criticisms of automotive LED bulbs is size. Many companies offer LED bulbs that have large heatsinks and can’t fit into housings designed for compact halogen bulbs. Our bulbs are designed to be compact in size and offer a true plug and play installation. This means that our bulbs will fit anywhere that your OEM bulbs can fit. No modifications needed, just plug in your LED bulbs like you would with any other replacement and you are ready to drive. When installing your bulbs, it is important to test them before sealing everything back up because the electrical connection may be polar sensitive.
Another criticism that many bulbs on the market face is poor focus. Foglight and taillight assemblies are designed to take the light emitted from your bulbs’ filaments and focus them using reflectors and projector lenses. If the light source from your LED bulbs does not line up with the position of your former OEM halogen bulb, the assembly will not be able to properly focus the output. We designed our SL1 and SLF LED bulbs to match this positioning as closely as possible, which helps our bulbs produce a truly focused beam instead of a large amount of glare.
In addition to being precisely focused, our bulbs are also designed to handle a wide range of environmental conditions. We use our state of the art testing chambers to ensure that our bulbs will perform in almost any condition. These bulbs are cycled between temperature extremes of -40 to 185 degrees fahrenheit. This means that you can rest assured that whether you are driving through the tundra or the desert, your Diode Dynamics bulbs will continue to perform as expected.
So if you are looking to make the upgrade to automotive LED bulbs, you have come to the right place. Use our convenient vehicle finder tool to find all of our products that will fit your vehicle. If you have any questions about our lighting products, our team is always happy to help. You can reach us by calling 314-205-3033 or send an email to [email protected].
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