The part marked 111 is a resistor. Connected in parallel to all the rest, 1.8W of waste just to make sure the dead bulb sensor will recognize the device as a bulb. Must be rather hot.
Two parts marked 181 are resistors. In series with LEDs.
Several months is not “long service life”.
LED’s in vehicles are a bad idea when using Plug N’ Play bulbs. If you must put LED’s in, retrofit a custom board in.
You can use 5mm superflux or plain 5mm made by reputable companies with just a simple v-reg to stabilize voltage. 9v vregs are generally best as 12v will cause less output when the alt isnt running.
Osram, Hp, Phillips they all make good ones. Red-orange is generally OEM as it has better visibility when compared to Red.
Copper holed bread board, Leds, Vreg, Resistors, Soldering supplies, and some time will yield MUCH better results than ANY plug and play bulb.
The best plug and play bulb is the ELEF bulbs that contain a single high power LED with a 360 degree optic to act like a filament. With the beam pattern out the sides, it can actually use the reflector and at a much better efficiency compared to a ton of misplaced little LED’s.
I replace my center high stop light (3rd brake) with some 5mm superflux ( about 30). Took me several hours for trial and error and results are good! Just used bread board to mount the through hole leds and a 9v reg to hold voltage steady, and designed my circuit around the 9v threshold.
Thanks for your response. They run cooler than the incandescent bulbs they replaced. However the original bulbs were very hot, easily burning my fingers when replacing one that was still working. 
I will buy some spare incandescent bulbs to replace the LEDs when they die.
that made me laugh. I don’t even know why they have that sub forum when all they do is lock threads and ban users for asking questions.
I’d go with an LED high brake light if you’re going in that direction, but find out what the local laws are first. I don’t think it’s a trivial undertaking and you’d want to make sure it’s not going to blind drivers behind you, but it’ll be interesting to see what you come up with.
How bright do you want it? I put some of these 7.5W & 11W ones on my Pajero in the 1156 & 1157 format (turning assist, front/back indicator, brake/parking, & reverse lights). My reverse lights using the 11W 1156 bulb looks as bright or brighter than my daytime running lights. Cool thing I like about these are that they have amber, red, & white LEDs so the coloured lenses on your car doesn't filter out the light on a white bulb.
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/322554/search?SearchText=7443
Thanks for the link BIGWOOD. That is the hardest part about trying to find decent replacement led’s for you car is sifting through all the low quality crap that is out there in order to find quality items that actually perform as good or better than stock.
I’ve had very limited success with this, the only LED lights still on my car are the liscence plate lights and the dome light.
I have a 99 Ford Explorer, and I thought there would be no issues with the brake lights being LED, as there is no bulb failure warning system and they don’t blink. I was wrong. At first it appeared to work, I was happy, and the LEDs were almost as bright as the incans. Then a week or two later I follow my wife home from the beach, (it’s her car) and I see a stuck on turn signal light. I didn’t touch the turn signals! After fiddling with it, I confirmed it was glitchy, so out came the LEDs.
I have heard of turn signals in particular needing some kind of ballast to work properly when bulbs are swapped for LEDs. Something to do with the relay not working properly at a lower load. That might also be why a blown indicator bulb causes the the one at the other end of the car to flash at twice the rate. That’s just a guess though.
I’ll be using a 12V to 5V 10A DC to DC converter to supply power to various driver boards for just the stop, turn, and tail lights. The vehicle is an pedal electric ebike with a 12v supply for the existing lights. The headlights will be 2 sets of 3 x XML in series with a high voltage modded driver and low value resistor(.5 ohm, 5W) with Hi/Low. The stop lights may have the existing activator control the Vdd pin on a single mode board. Still a lot of unknowns (no published manual) yet so will need to work one set of lights at a time.
LED’s work best on a specific amount of voltage. White bulbs need between 3.6 and 4.0 Volts. In you push more voltage through them they will produce more light, but also produce heat that can damage the bulb. Heat sinking draws the extra heat away from the bulb, helping to protect it. If it gets too hot, something called “thermal runaway” can happen.
There are professional LED lights for Cars, such as High quality 12 volt LED car lights. 1156, 1157, T10, T20 and Festoon LED bulbs are available. You can find license plate light, brake light, tail light, turning light and so on.
I have a pair of LED switchbacks off of ebay. Glow white with parking lights on then flash amber with the blinker on.
This site http://www.superbrightleds.com has a lot different types.
I have noticed two problems with other cars’ tail lights. Some are too bright and some are speckled. The former seems to be that laws have not caught up with technology yet. The latter is a problem in the led manufacture process. The material is too homogeneous, so the spread of wavelengths is too narrow.
I don’t know of any bulbs that are bright enough to be good replacements, that also don’t get too hot. Reliability and high output just don’t go hand in hand with pnp bulbs, and the fill is terrible. None of the bulbs have enough effective heatsinking for the desired output. I found that I could only be happy with a custom install. Over the last 3 years of messing with LED flashlights, mostly because of this forum, I found it easy enough to fab my own. Just like HID swaps (retrofits really are needed), I wouldn’t just drop in a bulb in place of a stop lamp or signaling lamp (the others can run fine though).
Of course, as with flashlights, you also can almost never have enough backup lighting:
Compared to stock 27W incandescent bulb. All stock bulbs were 27W - backup and stop.
60W of backup lighting, 40W of brake lighting and they stay under 40C above ambient when running for hours, without airflow. You know you want to go all-out - LED’s run cool, use quality drivers, and are of a desirable color temperature. :bigsmile:
There is a resistance sensor in the turn signal lamp circuit. An open circuit triggers the high rate of flash. Retrofitting LEDs is a great idea if the light output is a good match. Dim or super bright running lights, turn signals and back-up lamps are just as illegal as one that does not function in NAFTA and EU countries. And maybe some more. The best LED retrokits that I’ve seen include a lamp assembly, driver and replacement lenses but they aren’t cheap. Nice if you have a need to replace the lenses anyway.
Look at some of the new lamps on the road - the best way to get them to work properly is an array of emitters.
thanks, I didn’t know that!
In my experience LED tailight bulbs typically last less than a year. The wires in their bases have been the weak spot on the ones I’ve bought from lightingnext
That said, I just replaced them again. Maybe this batch will hold up better.
Why do I keep replacing them with LEDs when I’ve had such poor luck? LEDs light up a split second before incandescent brake light bulbs do. When you see that split second difference in real life you’ll see how significant it is. Even at 30mph you go over 4 feet in less than a 10th of a second.
Incandescent bulbs burn out often, so they are usually easy to reach, apparently intended for owner replacement with possible exceptions. This will probably change as leds become integrated.
this is why i want to go with LED, but i would want better then or at least equal to incandescent bulb life, and decent quality, i won’t risk a car fire due to cheap dangerously made bulbs
I tried some T10 LED bulbs for instrument light and reading light, till now they works well. The light brightness is good.
But I for headlight, have no plan to switch to LED now. Will go and see for a while.