Is LED the future for automotive lighting applications?

Many vehicle drivers are always upset by the insufficient light from their headlights or taillights, which will provide poor visibility on the road, making the driving more dangerous. Especially at night, the strong glare from the other vehicles coming from the opposite direction will make the drivers feel nervous and difficult to see the road ahead. Accidents often occur in this case because the drivers have some difficulty to judge the distance and see clearly the vehicles ahead. However, with LED lighting being used for automotive application, the safety on the road has greatly increased as the road ahead gets well lit by LED headlights and the drivers feel eased when driving at night.

LED lights have been produced for commercial lighting and industry lighting for a long time ago, but LED lighting for vehicle was first introduced in 2003. With the increasing LED technology and improving performance of LED lights, many customers begin to buy LED lights for vehicle over fluorescent lights and halogen lights. What’s more, many manufacturers realized that there will be a huge potential LED lights market for automotive lighting applications and have started producing the kind of lights.

Compared with all other types of automotive lights, LED lights have some very distinct advantages. Their features of longer lifespan, great performance, lower power consumption, high light output and lower heat dissipation make them become the perfect solution of automotive lighting. Slowly but steadily, LED technology will be applied on rear combination lamps, brake lights, turn signals, interior reading lights, daytime running lamps, fog lights, position and market lamps, etc. Over the year, LED lights are now being used for many vehicles, such as off-road vehicle, 4*4 vehicles, military and trucks. In the future, LED lights will be produced to be more suitable for different types of vehicles, such as bicycles, trains and emergency vehicles.

Cars manufacturers are selecting LED lighting over other types of lights due to their ease of assembly, reliability, longevity, and competitive price. They believe that LED lights will have a bright future for automotive lighting applications because they have more advantages than conventional lights. LED lighting is adaptive to different environmental and traffic-related requirements, the dynamic bending of light or adaptive front lighting systems will help the driver see the obstacles on the road clearly. Many lamps have a defect that the lights will move together with the cars, but LED lights are resistant to vibration generated by a moving vehicle. They react very quickly to be full light intensity, but standard incandescent car lights usually take a lot of time to get switched on. The most attractive feature is that car maker can have an innovative design of LED lighting and design a unique LED light depending on the vehicle models.

With the rapidly-developing lighting technologies and the introduction of new technologies, LED lighting manufacturers will produce even better comfort and homogenous light and more types of LED lights to meet a wide variety of vehicles. LED lights will have a bright future for automotive lighting application.