LED Bulbs

LED bulbs use less than 1 watt of power on average which reduces the power draw from the battery and in turn reduces fuel consumption. The average life of a LED bulb is around 30,000 hours which means it will outlast your car!

Because LED bulbs response time is instant this adds to their safety value when used as stop and tail lights as filament bulbs have a reaction time of 0.2 seconds. This might appear to be a small difference but 0.2 seconds equates to 5 metres stopping distance.

LED bulbs can’t be fitted on all cars easily as I’ve found with my MK5 Golf which required resistors fitted inline with the LED unit to prevent issues which I’ll mention later.

LED Car Sidelights

If your looking to change the style of the light from your headlights then another upgrade you may want to consider is LED sidelight’s these can help produce a bluish light giving your headlights more of a xenon style. LED bulbs have been developed for the motor industry because they are brighter, more durable, longer lasting, instant response and use much less power than standard bulbs. Car sidelights come in two sizes that I know of 501 and 233 these sizes are both available as LED bulbs.

With our New Beetle and Skoda Fabia vRS we have fitted 501 LED Super Bright White they give off a nice pale blue glow when just the side lights are on and when main beam is on add to the whiteness of the light.

This issue on the MK5 Golf was that the LED’s came on for 5 or 6 seconds then went off and flagged a warning light on the dash of bulb failure. To get round this you need to splice in resistors to the existing wiring which I wasn’t prepared to do.

With the MK5 Golf rather than LED’s I went for Phillips Blue Vision 501 bulbs and although they don’t have the same brightness of the LED bulbs they still changed the colour of the headlights to a brighter blueish white.