"Warmer" CCT LED Car Headlights

This CCT (and to a much less extent CRI) is what keeps me from spending the money on LEDs for our trucks. Well, I eventually caved on the 2018 because the factory halogens are terrible- much worse than the 9008 in my 2011. I mean much worse. The ’11 isn’t so bad with good bulbs and my 12awg relay harness but its not amazing either. Ended up caving on the ’18 and stuck some LED bulbs in. They aren’t perfect but at least I can see now. Terrible tint, though.

Anybody know what emitters Morimoto uses and the CCT?

yes, I forgot say that these harsh junk LEDs are also inside the car compartment
as courtesy light,when turned on they are dangerous because distract driving more.
Are them usually sealed or easier to change than the headlights?
The old incandescent was perfect,soft diffuse light not too much bright.
and if compared on LED at same CCT, by eye you will notice that the light is more yellow and cold due to greater emission of Blue light and less presence of deep Reds

That’s one reason I like older cars with halogen lights. I’m not worried about efficiency of the light in a car, so give up 100 CRI? Not much luck finding warm white 9007 bulbs, but at least I can have neutral white, and the 100 CRI is big. If I were to add driving lights, which I should, since my last car was totaled in a caribou collision, I’d get Lightforce Striker halogens, which are 3300K.

I swapped all my interior lights with WW 194s, stacked 5050s. No idea of the CRI, but they’re a quite nice warm color, not piss-yellow or anything.

I swapped all the lights in the rear, but left the front lights as-is for now. Might replace the turn/markers after a while, but haven’t done so yet, as I need to parallel some resistance, just enough to keep it from thinking there’s a bulb out.

No way am I replacing the hotwire bulbs in the low/high slots. I don’t want to do without the dust-covers, and with a LED swap, you pretty much NEED to do that for the fans, heatsinks, braids, whatever.

Where’d you source your WW 194 LED’s? There’s so many sellers of these on eBay, many with low feedback ratings and questionable junk. Always appreciate knowing of a seller that delivers as promised.

Amazon, mainly, but a few odd ones from Fasttech. The usual stacked 5050s come in 5, 9, and 13 LEDs.

Goggled some orders, various on Amazon like uxcell, GRV-LED, Summer-Online, and autocarstore. Most of these are probably generic enough that they get binned in common, so it’s still a crapshoot, but hey…

I can’t stand ice blue light. On a couple of car forums I used to frequent, there were guys “showing off” their 6500k flooded cabins using LED 194 bulbs, with comparison shots of the “horrible old incan bulbs”! I was like yuck… on the LED’s. Such harsh lighting, not good on the eyes. I couldn’t find any company making neutral or even warm leaning LED 194’s, so I gave up. Last I’d looked was about 2 years ago. I’m pretty stoked to hear they’ve finally arrived. I wonder if they’re available in festoon format as well. Will check out.

For my old car’s dome-light, I made my own LED replacement out of perfboard and a bunch of 5mm LEDs.

Diffused cover, so it didn’t much matter that the LEDs were directional.

I ordered warm white 194s from here and they are pleasantly warm:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32559951378.html

I also ordered a few different warm white festoons, but none were as warm or the right tint I was hoping for (kind of an ugly yellow/orange). Currently I have a warm white 48 SMD led panel with a festoon adapter in my dome light. Much brighter than any festoon, but it gets quite hot and the tint is not as nice as the 194s:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32263082885.html

Thanks. I have an Audi A3 and CANBUS can be a real pain on bulb out warnings. I’m going to have to double-check on whether or not the alerts are for interior as well as exterior illumination.

Cool white LED headlights are proliferating in my area rapidly. I’m finding now that I’m starting to hate driving around town during the morning. All the glare in unreal. I am finding physically blocking oncoming LED headlights with small boards on my walks helps me in seeing better. When I do this I can see others walking around me much more clearly. Admittedly I’m completely losing the area covered by the board, but I wouldn’t have seen past the glare anyways. The thing is disability glare happens before discomfort glare, so if you feel your eyes hurting from the light you’re already well past the point of not seeing things.

I’m also using some fairly aggressive, –30% blue, glasses on top of the physical blocker in areas saturated in blue-rich LED. What a dystopic present we live in.

well, just to add fuel to this fire,
those ice-blue headlights do not help me see the deer (or chickens?)
preparing to cross the road in front of me as well as halogens do.

actually, the fog-lamps or running lights
do a better job than the headlights.

and, right now is the rut season for those cervidaes.
so, they are looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places.
of course, in current vernacular, there is no “wrong” place.

in answer to the original post….i would, too.
i would pay extra for 3500K. not $3500, though.

It seems the cooler LEDs for headlights are used for the extra lumens and less heat vs the warmer CCTs. And when it comes to high beams, the LEDs aren’t good enough when compared to halogen or HID. So some of the auto makers (like BMW) are using lasers.

You have a resource on this? I just have really hard time believing this with lights like the neutral white BLF GT throwing neutrally tinted light over a mile and the K1 with the old XHP-35 3000K throwing intense light over long distances.

Headlights are a huge floodlight, not a pencil beam. The LEDs in the BLF GT and the K1 are extremely overdriven. They wouldn’t last very long in the confined headlight enclosure where little cooling is available.

There are a lot of websites that compare halogen, HID, LED, and laser headlights.

Here’s one from BMW: Half a mile visibility with a BMW laserlight

“using laserlight headlights to enhance high beams provides a much greater range than traditional LEDs”

But that resource still doesn’t prove your point that “warm white LED high beams are not feasible.” Furthermore, how many carmakers are actually putting LEPs in car headlights? It’s been years since development started on that, and you can count all the models of cars on your fingers that have them.

I also found this nice resource from the University of Transportation in Michigan… Their research was conducted years ago, and they used 4000K LED headlights, and that was way back when you took a big hit in output from the warmer tints. Now, the outputs have leveled out, or a very close to. I know years ago 3000K hit parity with 4000K and 5000K for LED streetlighting, and now 2700K is near parity to. Their research said to use the warmest CCT feasible, and they were successfully testing 4000K models…

I wonder if there`s some sort of c=tinted spray you could apply to the outside of the headlight in order to get a better tint, kind of like Lee filter but in a spray.

A filter would work but since filters are subtractive, it would significantly reduce the output of the headlights.

This is interesting! It looks like Morimoto is coming out with 3000K LED sealed lights. You can read more here. The photo they show on that thread, assuming that’s the 3000K model in that pickup, they look pretty nice. I wish I could ditch the 6500K blue-rich junk in my car.