LED lighting units are complicated electroncis and often poorly built. The LED bulb may last tens of thousands of hours, but if other components don't its not a boast which can be relied upon.

Repairing them means fault finding and dismantling fiddly electronics before replacing the faulty component.

I've had two LED outside security lights, neither lasted more than 2 years. I replaced it for a 250w halogen, which is what I had previously which needs a new bulb every 3-4 years.

For comparison Outback rear light units were £250 and £150 a couple of years ago. Part of the light is in the tailgate, hence the two components making up the unit.

As I recall, some former electrical engineer colleagues (I was a mechanical engineer) of mine said much the same about at least the first two generations of commercially-available LED lights in the construction industry - nice lamps, r****** electronics and build quality.

One one job, LED spot lamps (similar to those in k i t c h e n s) that should have been lasting 10 years were having to be replaced within 6-12 months. I remember going to a site visit prior to handover where loads of spots had to be replaced.

Meanwhile, my 18yo car's lights (all of them) are still on their original halogen bulbs with no problems.

AFAIK,lights, even now, dont do anything very sophisticated, being basically ON or OFF.

Auto dipping for an oncoming vehicle is the most sophisticated function I'm aware of, though of course there is probably some superfluous what-will-they-think-of-next-and-WHY? s***e that I havn't heard of.

This seems to imply that, even if they are computer/data bus controlled, it would be practical to retrofit a parallel old-school control system of conventional current-carrying wires and switches.

Tricky bits would be the user interface, where you might need add-ons to the controls, and fooling the ECU that there were no glitches in the nominally intact Matrix.

Certainly not trivial. and would be completely illegal in, for example, Taiwan, but it would beat paying some of the ludicrous prices Ive heard of. for bits that quite soon wont be available anyway.

Also beaten of course by any old car, like my last one, where tail-light bulbs were free at the inspection, but cost about 10p in the shops. Headlights I dunno, since I never replaced one. The front lens was glass so no cataracts.

It did need a column switch unit replaced, and a few local earth connections added. I put LEDs in the side indicators because the bulb holders had broken down in the sun and it was easier to improvise a holder for an LED strip (IIRC 3 in series to get the voltage about right for the flasher relay) with a bicycle tail reflector as lens.

These replaced a temporary pass-inspection work-around using a short string of old Christmas Tree lights, which only lasted a year or two.

Edited by edlithgow on 09/05/2024 at 02:27