LED tail light bulbs?

Ok so I am looking at getting tail light bulbs for my car since I can’t find me a pair of led tail lights for my car. When I install the bulbs ( turn signals for example ) I am going to put one on the front and one in the back. Will that cause my turn signal to be insanely fast or will my turn signal still flash normally with led tail light bulbs. Also, does anyone know of a site that sells replacement LED tail lights for a 2005 Hyundai XG350? I would like to know so I dont have to get the bulbs and could get a cool tail light or something.

So basically my questions are,

  1. Will my turn signal flash normally if I put LED bulbs in them?
  2. Can anyone find a site that sells a whole tailamp ( preferably LED ) for a 2005 Hyundai XG350

-Thanks!

1) No, you have to buy a replacement flasher
2) Look for the specification on the type of bulb used on your car, search for “that” +LED
3) Don’t trust replacement LEDs to be as bright as the original stock bulbs.
They should be — but if they’re not you might be found responsible in an accident due to inadequate lighting.
That’s less of a problem than it used to be, but — ya never know.

more crap on the market than good.
wound up making my own for a 1970 olds 442 i am helping a friend restore.
used luxeons for tails and front turns.
reverse are phillips lumileds altilon 1x4.
and no excuses for backing into something in the dark will be accepted!

ebay.uk has all these and so will your e-bay.I beleive leds do not have enough resistance for the flasher unit and flash too fast. These bring them back to spec.If the page is blocked by e-bay,search was simply 50w 6 ohm resistors.

If they use standard. 1156 tail light bulbs check out banggood, they have pretty good selection of led lights

Thank you for attention and response

Electronic Flasher Cam is the easiest fix as it fixes them all. If you go the resitor route, use only heat sinked versions, and you need one per light (LED).

Might be wise to check that an electronic flasher cam will be compatible with the vehicles ‘CAN bus’ system, via maybe a Hyundai owners forum. I have no doubt this has been done countless times before.

I’m thinking about getting a few 1156/P21W and T10/W5W LED bulbs for my new-old car. Couple for parking light, couple for stop lights etc. But my knowledge about LED bulbs is very limited if that. Never fitted a LED light in a car.

What terms I should be looking for when searching for them? Cree, SMD, COB…?

Thanks WarHawk but I already know which type of bulbs I need for my car. Besides, that bulb finder not very useful with European market cars. My question was about LED technologies and bulb properties that I should look at for this purpose.

Unless your message wasn’t addressed to me :slight_smile:

No so easy to answer, all depends on the type of light fitting design you have on your car.

What I mean by that is how the light from your bulb interacts with the reflector/lense etc and how it looks to the naked eye when illuminated as oblivious this is a safety issue too as the main purpose of lights on a car is for the benefit of others

Most car lights were designed around incandescent bulbs that scater light out in all directions from the glass
A lot of the led type bulbs can’t replicate that so the light fitting on your car does not function as the designer intended

I fitted some led bulbs to my 911 brake and tail lights, took me four different led bulbs to find some that made the reflector and lense show the right amount of light and work as the designer intended

So it’s not as easy as just fitting bulb X

Maybe try a forum for your car model and see what people on there have found that works

I understand where you’re going with this, dw911. And I don’t expect that someone here will offer THAT perfect bulb for THAT particular car model. Since my knowledge about LEDs is limited to put it mildly I’m was mainly looking for keywords that would help me choose something decent. But if it’s not that easy like you say then sorry for spamming :slight_smile:

P.S. the car is an Opel/Vauxhall so because they’re so widespread all over Europe “variety” on forums is too wide.

Replacement LED bulbs are not as bright as the ones built in your car, so you need a replacement flasher. Inadequate lighting will cause accidents. You can search up LED tail light bulbs online by looking for the type of specification used in your car.

I was running 3357s or 3557s or whatever’s the 40W hotwire bulbs vs the usual 32W bulbs. The red taillights I got from JDM-ASTAR were marginally brighter than the hotwire bulbs, and fill the whole housing with nice even light (ie, no single-point hotspot in the middle and dark everywhere else). I was grinning like an idiot when I saw the difference. :smiley:

Since then, I use JDMs for pretty much every big-bulb hotwire replacement: turns front/back, reverse lights, you name it. For replacing 194s in the tags, markers, etc., I’ve experimented with quite a few kinds of bulbs (red/amber/WW/NW) and just kinda picked what suited me at the time. Standard 5×5050s are okay, 9×5050s are better, if they’ll fit.

Anyway, for red taillights, I’d seriously recommend JDMs. Just CHECK FIRST whether you have standard sockets or “CK” type sockets. Regular have one end as ground, CKs have one side as ground. Get it wrong, and you’ll pop some fuses. it’s easy to check with a meter, though, and there are instructions online how to do that.

It is no longer true that LED bulbs for vehicles are dimmer than the incandescent bulbs. I came across a pair of red LED bulbs similar to this at a garage sale for a buck so I bought them. They were brighter than the existing tail light but were too long to fit in the space occupied by the bulb. I ended up completely revamping the rear light with a different solution and not using bulbs but flat LED units. So, the two wrenches thrown into my retrofit were the darn CK sockets and available space. You are better off installing 6 ohm 50W resistors at a buck a pair from China sellers than trying to change the flasher module. I bought one rated for LEDs and it did not work - still flashed as thought the lights were out.

Noooooooooo!

With 6Ω resistors, you can unplug the bulbs completely and it’ll still blink happily as is everything’s fine.

If you don’t mind experimenting, try anything from 20Ω or 22Ω or even up to 33Ω. Use as high a value as will reliably not show an error.

Then, if something does go wonky with the LED bulb, if, say, half the LEDs don’t light up anymore, it’ll (correctly) throw an error that it’s not drawing enough current.

Odds are your LED bulbs just need a little shove of extra current to fool the flasher, so dumping a whole incandescent bulb’s worth of current defeats the error-detection function of the flasher.

The only reason they sell 6Ω resistors is to dumb-down the flasher so that yeah, nothing in the socket at all but empty air won’t throw any errors.

if someone rear ends you, your tail light brakes, most likely, and if a person takes a pic of it and there will be led bulb instead of stock bulb, things may be more complicated as far as your insurance claim goes. seen a guy lose a case, he was rear ended and his tail lights were tinted. he got a ticket right on the accident scene for tinted tail lights, the guy who hit him sued him, and won. i used to work for body shop, seen few cases like that. anything you do to your car that alters dot approved safety equipment opens you for lawsuits , even if your completely stock tail lights are too dirty, and someone rear ends you, they may bring it up to their insurance company and case will not be straightforward

I am not at all concerned about the two scenarios presented above. I have decades of driving experience and in all of those years have been rear ended just twice. Both were at traffic signals, a red light and stop sign. I was at a stop when hit. Even a shyster lawyer couldn’t argue away who was at fault. I don’t consider the likelihood of another rear end to be a great worry.

You can read the requirements for vehicle lighting at the Code of Federal Regulations Title 49 Subsection 571.108 Standard No. 108; Lamps, reflective devices, and associated equipment. It does not prohibit the use of LEDs as is evidenced by their common use in all new vehicles. These regulations were written for manufacturers of vehicles and of equipment.

I did not change color or markedly increase the intensity of the light for each lamp. What was amber is amber, red is red, and white (backup) is white. I have seen new cars with obnoxiously bright rear lights so the DOT regulations about brightness can’t be that stringent. The only difference is that I used LED modules and COBs in place of the old incandescent bulbs. They are permanently mounted on boards within the light. They shine directly on the lens and illuminate the lens the same as the bulb did. The light is more evenly spread across the lens for better visibility.

As to using 6 ohm resistors to defeat the “burned out bulb” response, that is no longer an issue with LEDs. A regular incandescent bulb goes dark when the filament breaks but I have three separate modules or COBs for each part of the light and they are wired in parallel. That means there is redundancy so if one module fails there are still two working. They are rated 20,000 hours. COBs are even better because each individual LED in the COB is separate and if one goes out the rest continue to shine. They are all wired directly to the circuit board in the tail light. Even the bulbs shown in my first post have redundancy. Each of the 6 segments is wired in parallel so if one segment fails, the other 5 continue to light.

I could have purchased LED tail lights that just bolt in place for $110 a pair. They are all LED and do not look anything like the OEM lights but the seller (US based) says this about them:
Direct OEM fit replacement Compliant with FMVSS-108/DOT/SAE Brighter and quicker light-up with better visibility Lasts longer than non- LED aftermarket lights Fully street legal.

On my ’96 Explorer I’ve replaced ALL the exterior lighting with Zevos, sans headlights (the good LED replacements are still too expensive) and the third brake (which I had already replaced with an LED retrofit board) . The red markers are about the same as before. However, the brake lights are at least twice the brightness as the OEM bulb. The rear amber turns and front marker/turns are about the same, but the fronts are more evenly lit, so they still end up being more visible against the headlights vs the OEMs. I later found even brighter amber bulbs for the rear (IMO it’s better for signaling on busy highways and as hazard flashers). Also, I replaced the Zevos in the backups with bulbs that have the same LED placement, but have twice as many emitters. I gave the amber Zevos to my brother for use in his F-350, and the white Zevos to my dad for his Mercury Tracer.

I went with the electronic flasher over resistors. The Explorer has two front signals per side, and the flasher is under the steering wheel and is easily accessible from the floorboard. So, it was relatively cheap ($12) and took a lot less time than wiring in any resistors.