Headlight Upgrade - LED replacing Halogen

[Route246]

Anyone have recent experience replacing halogen headlights with the newest LED offerings? I'm going to replace my '15 Prius halogens with LEDs I'm getting from Amazon. Our two other vehicles have LED headlights and I'm spoiled. The fitment is H11 bulbs. Prices range from about $45/pair up to $150+ so it is not that much to give it a try. I avoided HID because of the cost, size, heat and hassle. LED seems much easier and less problematic.

[evo77]

Most of the LED bulbs on Amazon are garbage. Do not let positive reviews (many of them fake) fool you into believing that its a great bulb. Because the sad reality is that many people don't understand what a proper beam pattern is. They see a ton of foreground light and light shining everywhere else (much of which is above the cutoff line causing disabling glare to other drivers) and automatically assume that its better than the original halogen source.

There are very few LED headlight bulbs that are properly designed optically to achieve the appropriate beam pattern. And even less that have both optical and thermal performance to maintain maximum brightness for a very long time.

One company I will say that has put in a lot of R&D to developing one of the best single filament LED bulbs on the market and that is Diode Dynamics. They have done plenty of photometric testing of their LED bulb in various headlamps to test for FMVSS 108 compliance. In projector and reflector headlamps they have faired quite well. Not only is the optical engineering on point, they have gone through great lengths to ensure that the materials used for the bulb assembly are high quality and ensure long life and high performance. Fully designed and manufactured in the USA from the ground up. Not a borrowed or copied Chinese design.




With that being said, there are a few Chinese companies that also do put in the same effort to produce a quality LED bulb. There are a few details of a bulb that could potentially indicate its a quality bulb. Most of the best performing are ones that use CSP chips (Chip Scale Package) because of their tiny size and when stacked together can mimic the size of a tungsten filament. The Luxeon Z ES is probably the most popular. Any LED bulb that has large single chip usually means it will perform horrible.





Now your Prius has a Koito h11 projector that is common in a lot of Toyota/Lexus vehicles. A member on another forum tested a particular H11 LED bulb and had good results.



Halogen


LED



There are some other market H11 LED bulbs that are high quality but no beam pictures yet in US headlamps.

[ntwillie1]

The fact that Evo77 went Above and beyond to post so much information to help out the OP is impressive. Thanks for sharing.

[Rtrick87]

Props to Evo77 for that information, just don't go throwing any bulbs in. Another very good distributor is TheRetrofitSource.com, Lightwerkz.com, and Opt7. Make sure your vehicle does have projector headlights because if not.... unless you have some kind of cutoff shield your going to blind many drivers.. and if you blind a cop, we will stop and cite you for it .

[evo77]

Unfortunately TRS doesn't offer a good performing LED headlight bulb. And Lightwerkz is only a installer/retrofitter and reseller. Opt7 only rebrands Chinese bulbs. They are not good performing bulbs.

With the right LED bulb, a reflector housing can achieve a proper beam pattern with very little extra glare over the original halogen. In fact all halogen reflector headlamps give off some amount of glare. It's just kept under the maximum glare levels allowed under the FMVSS 108 standard. Which by the way the US has higher allowed glare levels than Europe and Asia.

Here is the current H13 bulb I have in my car and the comparison I did with the halogen.

[Route246]

Thank you for all of the feedback. This will be an interesting exercise.

[evo77]

Can I ask you which bulbs you purchased?

[Route246]

Can I ask you which bulbs you purchased?

I chose these for the first pass: Amazon.com: CougarMotor LED Headlight Bulbs All-in-One Conversion Kit - H11 (H8, H9) -7,200Lm 6000K Cool White CREE - 3 Year Warranty: Automotive

I'm OK with making multiple purchases to get it right. This is 100% elective surgery so I can always revert to the stock halogen if things don't work out for whatever reason.

[DMW]

I have an aftermarket LED bulb on my dual sport bike and I love it for off-road and speeds below 55mph at night. It is really freaking bright for lower speeds. If you're cruising down a dark road at higher speeds, it's not very good because it does not throw the light far enough.

Hey evo77, did you used to be on SRTFORUMS? That name seems very familiar.

[evo77]

I chose these for the first pass: Amazon.com: CougarMotor LED Headlight Bulbs All-in-One Conversion Kit - H11 (H8, H9) -7,200Lm 6000K Cool White CREE - 3 Year Warranty: Automotive

I'm OK with making multiple purchases to get it right. This is 100% elective surgery so I can always revert to the stock halogen if things don't work out for whatever reason.

Ok good. Yes I love Amazon for their returns. Makes it so easy.

I'm hopeful that the bulbs you chose are decent however its unlikely. But the good thing is I want to help you select the right bulb for your vehicle. One that will perform and provide a safe, compliant and usable beam pattern.

As here is more food for thought, below is a comparison of H11 halogen/LED/bad LED.




And a thermal filter on the same image so that we can easily see the beam characteristics. The bad LED has no hotspot! This translates into poor distance visibility which is very unsafe. Most of the extra light is just foreground illumination (which often gives drivers a false sense of security because a ton of light is directly in front of them). I also want to point out that, as you can see, a distinct cutoff is still present with the bad LED. And just because you have a cutoff that won't glare to other drivers does not give this bulb a passing grade whatsoever.