I’m not terribly surprised by that. Car makers by and large don’t care about the difficulty of a job that isn’t likely to be necessary until the car is 6 years out of warranty. 
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Its not the number of years on a car that kills LEDs and bulbs. Longevity depends on the number of on and off cycles, the number of hours the lights are on, the amount of vibration, temperature extremes, moisture and salt. The more a car is driven on paved roads for long distances in a mild climate, without salt, without idling in stop and go traffic, etc. the longer the bulbs and fixtures last. Put the same car on salted roads and/or where it rains more… like Canada, Alaska, or in any climate that gets extremely hot and or extremely cold, and/or near the ocean, with heavy traffic, and you won’t get 10 years before they start quitting. Commuting every day in stop and go traffic on heavily salted roads in a northern winter climate…Those light are on practically all the time, and they don’t last as long. The brake-light LEDs on my wife’s 2008 Solara are a case in point. Car has 120,000 miles and the things have each died in last four years. Replacement required removing entire fixture to get at the LED strip. Wife commuted back and forth in traffic when we lived in DC suburbs for 10 years.
Nobody can convince me, someone who does light maintenance on boat equipment and the things that tows them, that LEDs are a good idea for either trailers or cars that are kept for more than 5 years. Not in my area, where there is tons of salt, snow, rain, rough and dirt roads.
The math is simple: you can replace any failed incandescent bulb on a car truck or trailer for $0.50 to $25, even a headlight bulb. Or you can spend $25 to $500 to fix or replace an exterior LED. Interior incandescents go for 50 cents to a couple of bucks. Interior LEDs start at $5.00.
On boat trailers LEDs are an unmitigated disaster. The lights are mounted less than a foot off the road on vehicles without shock absorbers. They get smacked by stones and are dunked every time the boat goes in and out of the water. You can expect a “high cost/quality” LED to last 2-3 seasons assuming fresh water use. You can expect Optronics, as cheaply made as any of them at about $20, to fail in as little as one launch in salt water. Once it fails, you get to replace that trailer fixture, and keep doing so each time it fails. I make lots more cash replacing LEDS trailer lights than I do replacing $2.00 bulbs!
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you can mount any lights like this to help.
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Mine’s driven on potholed roads in Minnesota winters that easily hit -20 before windchill (a few years back we had 50 days in a row where the temperature never got above 0) and enough salt thrown down to bait every deer in North America, in rush hour. So I’d say the stress test is fairly decent. Now, I don’t make a habit of dunking my car in the ocean like you do with boats, so I wouldn’t presume to comment on whether or not they’re good ideas for watercraft or their trailers. But for general automotive use? I’d say I probably road-stress the systems in my car more than many, and the LEDs have been great.
I suppose the caveat to that is that the cars I’ve had with LEDs have been made by Acura and Lexus, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re putting higher quality LEDs in their cars than Ford is putting in its, if for no other reason than that they have a reputation as being reliable and they don’t want to irritate owners by having expensive light bulbs go out all the time.
It isn’t just about pure math. If I go 10 years without replacing any bulbs, and you replace bulbs every few years at an average of $10 per, you’ve spent more money than me, even though it’s more expensive to replace my systems.
Honestly I find replacement cost arguments, on their face, nonpersuasive. If we’re going purely based on cost to replace we should all be riding bicycles from Kmart. But there are advantages to more modern technology, even if that modern tech is more expensive when you have to replace it. And one of those advantages is that I don’t have to replace modern tech as often as I did in the old days.
And that’s not just a pure money thing either - it’s also a time thing. If you make $40 per hour, and it takes you an hour to go down to the auto parts store and buy a bulb and then come back home and get the tools out to install it, and you do that as few as 3 times in 5 years, you’ve added $120 to the price of the bulbs, because you’re worth $40 an hour, and you’re spending those 3 hours working for free.
Beyond the economic consideration of time is the pure time consideration of time. A 40 hour week is a short week for me, and that’s at my day job. I also have a side-thing going which takes time. And I have to keep the house clean, and fix things around the house, and maintain the cars, and mow, and weed the garden, and clear the driveway in the winter, and, and, and… And I have to go help my sister-in-law fix her house and cars, and I should probably spend time with my nephew so he remembers what I look like. Plus my wife and I both have aging parents at various stages of disability who need a lot of help. In short, we don’t have very much free time at all, and what little we have goes away when we have to do more chores.
It’s frankly worth spending $150 every once in awhile so that I don’t have to spend a lot less, but put in the time a lot more often, to replace bulbs.
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In principle LED assemblies can be made more rugged and better sealed than an incandescent bulb with its glass envelope.
Clear potting compound can solve the problem of salt water submersion.
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Absolutely, you can mount guide posts on the back of the trailer with high mounted LEDs. You can do the same for regular incandescents and for far less less cost.
But the guideposts solve only one problem: the dunking of two of the many lights on a trailer…
It doesn’t solve vibration (can make it worse) or the LED quality problem, or the mismatched diodes issue when they start to fail.
It does nothing for the other lights on a boat trailer: the center rear light, side marker lights, and fender mounted marker lights (at the widest part). There are more than two light fixtures on a boat trailer.
In theory LEDs can be made more waterproof exactly as you describe. Where did the idea come from? Um… we’ve installing better quality plastic encapsulated incandescent bulbs on trailers for decades. They are a little harder to replace than the unencapsulated bulbs but they still cost far less than the cheapest LEDs.
Look the guy asked for an informed opinion about LEDs. Mine is, and will continue to be that they should be avoided at all costs in any non-EV vehicle or trailer that you plan to keep for 5 to 10 years. On EVs they make sense since they save battery power and increase vehicle range. At least they should a little bit.
Glad to see you admit your experience is limited to a a few very high quality brands. Maybe if I worked only on those two brands I’d have a different opinion. But I deal with a wide variety of vehicles, and, for the most part vehicle LEDs have not, repeat NOT! lived up to all the the marketing hype. Not even, and sometimes especially not even, in higher priced supposedly more reliable brands. Far too many LED diodes don’t last 10 years, and parts (especially now) are impossible to get at reasonable cost in less than a day where I live. To make sure it will work I have to get a Toyota board from Toyota. Same for Honda. Same for Ram trucks and Ford and GM and the rest. There is not a good aftermarket in these things. If an LED tail light dies on a car it takes a day to get the board, more for the complete fixture. If a plain bulb goes out, I have a stock of them… and they don’t cost me +$20.00, unless it’s a high powered multi beam halogen bulb. I make more money per unit replaced, I just don’t get to replace as many and customers hate it when it takes more time to fix something simple. And they don’t like the prices…
So f you don’t have a lot of time to get your car repaired, you can be expected to be more annoyed when I tell you that I gotta keep your car overnight until the replacement LEDs come in tomorrow. Yeah. There’s that too. So those LEDs which you think are going to save you time at the shop? Naah. they don’t do that either.
The put up a bunch of LED lights in Syracuse NY (snowiest city in the US) a few years ago. Then the following year they added heaters to the lights to melt the snow and ice.
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Except that I don’t care, because assuming I don’t just replace it myself, I will take your loaner car or drive one of my other cars.
I get that you have a dislike for LEDs, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean those of us who have had positive experiences with them are wrong and must be argued into submission.
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As a DIY-er, I always considered my spare-time to be worth the minimum wage. If a bulb goes out, I buy two. And I seriously doubt that an LED assembly is going to last 40 years. Replacing bulbs in my three old Mazdas takes about 10 minutes per bulb. I am glad they are not LEDs.
Yup!
I recently learned that my left-side brake light was burned out. Because the other brake light bulb is also 11 years old, I proactively replaced that one, along with the one that had already burned-out. Because I already had the tailgate open and my tools were already out, it only took me 10 extra minutes.
This thread reminds me of discussions (in person back then) of tubes vs transistors in consumer electronics in the 60s and 70s.
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How many tubes did I replace to keep things running, many, how many transistors did I replace, only one, a power transistor on an old Fischer Quadraphonic stereo
This popped up on my Facebook this morning:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CXgtCuzAlQW/?utm_medium=copy_link
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One thing no one has considered here concerning LED brake lights. The time they take to come on as soon as the brake switch closes is about 0.22 seconds quicker than an incandescent bulb. The LED comes on almost instantly where the incandescent take between 0.22 and 0.25 seconds to illuminate. At 60 mph (88 ft/sec), that is about 20 feet. That could be the difference between getting bumped in the rear and not getting bumped, or if getting bumped, maybe lessening the impact slightly.
I use LEDs in the high mounted (third) brake light. Aftermarket LEDs often do not have a significant brightness difference between the tail light and brake light. But factory LED brake lights are great.
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