LED Headlight Upgrade?

Ok. I have read a lot of threads about lighting. I am not looking to change the headlights themselves, but I would like to put in LED bulbs for low/high beams and well as the fogs. What is the best DOT approved option?

 

There are no DOT approved drop in leds. The best bang for the buck are the beamtech fanless led's that run around 30-35 bucks.

 

Only DOT compliant options replace the housings with ones designed for LEDs. Here are nearly all the options for fogs:
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/the-led-sae-j583-fog-pod-fog-light-review.554813/

TRS/Morimoto is launching a new LED based headlight housing for 3rd gens that looks pretty sweet, preorders are being taken but product release is currently in Feb. Pricey though, but the only ones to do LED headlights the right way.

 

I have a 2018 and like the stock headlights...would you recommend just upgrading the halogen, or go LED and swap them back out at inspection time?

 

You all need to stop posting photos of the lights against your garage doors and post open road comparisons. With all the LED lights I've seen posted, you will overdrive them on the highway which is worse than sticking with the OEM halogen. I'm not sure why the draw to immediately 'upgrade' your new truck to a brighter lamp that throws light half the distance. It looks better driving slower, but if something pops out at 80 mph on the highway you can't avoid it. Hate on me all you want, almost everyone here has had the buyers remorse of upgrading their headlights only to discover they suck on the highway (myself included). There seem to be more and more of these posts, and all the lights being recommended seem to do is piss off oncoming traffic. More expensive HID kits don't seem to have that effect, but cost more so people avoid them in favor of cheaper, less beneficial alternatives.

 

I just don't like the color. I prefer a whiter light.

 

Agreed, especially when the running lights are so white.

 

Well that's a pile of BS. I've had HID and now have the led's and I won't go back. Nothing but issue with extensive kit and harder to find areas to fit the ballasts. Also the slow turn on times made high beams interesting. The LEDs that I'm using have exactly the same pattern are the stock bulbs and are about 1.5 times brighter.

 

I'm with you. I have been trying to like the Xtreme LED Pros (from XenonDepot) I installed a couple of weeks ago... You are right, slow driving in the city or residential areas, and I love how bright and well lit everything is. But, the cutoff is very annoying and perhaps even dangerous. If I'm making a tight corner / turn, I have zero peripheral visibility since the LEDs don't scatter the same as halogens in those housings. Cutoff ahead does seem to cut distance quite a bit - it's still illuminating past the cutoff somewhat but it's not helpful b/c the cutoff is so strong you eyes can't see past the bright light very well. I want to love these headlights b/c they are bright for sure, but with the loss of peripheral visibility and distance I'm likely to ditch them and reinstall the halogens soon

 

If you did a halogen upgrade like an H9 you'd get 80% more light output with exact same color and pattern as stock. It would likely pass an inspection.

Halogen doesn't do great with whiter lights as the majority of the light output is long wavelenght/yellower with little shortwavelenght/bluer light. If you go with a blue coated bulb, you'd want to increase wattage to counter the losses of the blue filter. Something like a 4000k H9 would work. Beam pattern will be identical to stock.
http://www.rallylights.com/h9-hella-high-performance-xenon-blue-v-2-0-bulb-pair.html

The DRLs are about 5000k, so a 4000k will look whiter than your existing bulbs, but maybe not white enough for your preference. Osram makes a 5000k H9 bulb. To get the higher color temperature, the coating is heavier which further reduces output, to get more output out they have increased the power to 75w. You can run these on the stock system but would get better performance with a standalone harness. Halogen options in this color range are really not ideal and I don't know if 5000k bulbs would pass an inspection as it would depend on how detailed they are.
https://www.powerbulbs.com/us/product/osram-cool-blue-boost-h9

You can actually tell the distance loss on the door if they are at a ~20-25 foot range. The hot spot disappears as the headlights loose focus, and the hot spot is how the headlight focuses light to project distance. Reduced hot spot focus or no hot spot means the pattern has shifted significantly toward the vehicle, meaning reduced distance projection. Of course lots of people park right next to the door so you cannot tell much of anything on pattern other than they still have projector cut offs which any light source will do. And few actually compare to an upgrade done in a way designed to maintain focus and distance projection. Lighting is very challenging to accurately photograph. The shift in light toward a vehicle looks great to most in photos, and even in person people favor lots of foreground light but they don't realize that it means less distance light, which is what is important.

This is due to the light shifting toward the vehicle as I mentioned above. The way to get light to project further in halogen housings is making bulb filaments smaller. Leading lighting companies like Osram and Philips have extended light projection by 150m with a stock wattage halogen by making fractionally smaller more precise filaments in their performance halogens. If making filaments ever so slightly smaller increases distance projection by 150m, it is easy to see how making them massively wider with a drop in LED that doesn't even uniformly light the housing (as the LEDs are only pointing to the sides) does the exact opposite. LEDs can put out more light than halogens, but the halogen optics are not designed to project that light effectively, so you might have more light but pattern and distance projection suffer. And more foreground light also constricts your pupils to degrade your night vision to further compound the problem.

Yeah, you definitely do not want to run HID in a high beam. Slow turn on time makes that hazardous. But the LEDs don't have the same pattern, they have the same cut offs from the projector which is different.

In an comparison of HID vs LED, you can see the cut off is the same. But the HID has a hot spot, and the LED does not. Same pic posted earlier.

XD Philips HID vs XD LED



While the HID is 1.8x brighter in output than the LED, the lack of focus from the LED makes the HID hot spot 3.8x brighter than the LED. Look at the Lux numbers below. Hot spot is what carries distance projection and the LED lacks one.

 

Link to these lights? Assume if they are stock wattage they wouldn't require any kind of harness or direct power from the battery?

 

If they're anything like silverstars, I put them in my wife's vehicle one time, they only lasted 4 months. Just a caution to going to a higher output halogen. Their durability usually stuffers greatly. I can't speak on the ones recommended however as I have no experience with them.

 

Correct these are a plug and play direct replacement bulb.
https://www.powerbulbs.com/us/product/osram-night-breaker-laser-next-generation-h11-twin

I've ordered a few other options to compare with those and will have them this week, including:
https://www.powerbulbs.com/us/product/osram-night-breaker-silver-h11-twin
https://www.powerbulbs.com/us/product/ge-megalight-ultra-h11-twin

Here is an article from Philips explaining how these work.
https://www.philips.co.uk/p-m-au/au...e-articles/article/improve-your-lights-easily

There is a price to pay for a high performance bulb, and it will be bulb life. The more extreme the bulb, the shorter the life. Philips +130 bulbs have a very reasonable life of 420 hours. The +150 bulbs drop to 200 hours.

However, Sylvania Silverstars are a coated bulb, and that coating filters out a huge amount of light. To make them actually put out enough light you must put a very high performance filament in there which will have a short life but still produce less light output than stock, though a whiter light. However, filtering light with colored filters causes them to get hot, so the blue filter causes lots of heat in the bulb, which makes lifespans even worse that it would be if it were just a high performance filament.

 

This website and the guy who owns the company has done some good research into the LED bulbs for every vehicle they sell for. They seem to be checking and looking for a lot of details in the bulb design and beam pattern that i havent seen from other places. https://headlightrevolution.com/

 

I've installed a pair of the Phillips X-treme Vision H11s last night and pulled out my LEDs. I prefer the warmer tone and the throw is better. Not nearly as bright, of course but far more functional and easy on my eyes. Definitely better throw and significant brightness upgrade over the stock halogens though. I know they won't last as long so I'll probably grab another pair (maybe the Osrams) and keep them in the truck. Good thing about these trucks vs. some other vehicles I've owned - low beam light swaps take <1 minute

 

For my 2016 I had them installed not quite sure of name brand but they had the cooling bands. I just purchased Vled high and low beam . The lows seem to be alittle brighter in the low beam.projector. also had purchased the V6tritens switchbacks for daylight@ directional. They run about 150 a pair but had promo going and got them for 120 pair

 

After trying them I’d actually recommend the GE +130s, they outperform the Osram +150s which I think have the blue coating encroach too much around the filament.

See how they compare to LEDs:
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads...alogen-reflectors.454371/page-6#post-18994810

Are you using the Xtreme +100 H11s? You can get better results with the GE +130s I linked a comparison to above.

 

Ordered for comparison, can always keep the philips onhand for backups since the higher output halogens have a shorter bulb life.

 

Performance halogens do have a shorter bulb life. Many people draw comparisons to Silverstars when thinking “performance halogen” (they are not one) in where the bulbs blue coating traps substantial heat in the bulb causing the Silverstar to fail early. Real performance halogens do not have that defect and last longer.

 

IIRC, the silverstars I used weren't coated (they didn't have color on them at least). One went out after 4 months, I assumed it was a fluke so I bought another 2 pack and held onto the other as a spare. A week or so later the other side went out. I ended up going through 4 bulbs in 8-10 months.