Johnhav430

Adaptive HID/xenon are my favorite headlamps, LED to me is different. Seems like everything has gone LED these days.

I don't think xenons should disappear, they do consume less power than halogens, and imho throw off the best light. Don't know how to describe it, but I less prefer adaptive LED which I have only experienced on loaner cars (don't own any with it)...

LexBob2

I believe the Gulia and Stelvio have xenons. I'm sure there are a few others too. In a couple recent tests from C&D and the IIHS xenons were rated higher than LED's.

Toys4RJill

This is a great question. I would of assumed that Xenon's are gone from cars. I do like LEDs.

Johnhav430

I can't help but feel that cost is one driving factor of deploying LEDs, but then power consumption is the slam dunk. I don't know how to describe it, though, the actual lighting, I feel, is best with HID/xenon, from the driver's seat. LED lighting for the home had this problem as well when it first was available, lower power, but wrong color, not dimmable, etc. But that's not what I perceive on the car, LED is excellent for headlamps, but xenon is excellent'er?

p.s. it used to be xenon was standard, and LED was optional, say on an A6. But now I think it's just LED...imagine paying less, getting more...dang

evident

I still can't help to feel that the xenons on my wife's rx350 from 2007and the custom retrofit hid I made for my accord puts out better light than the led lights on my 14 is350. The is isn't bad, Imo I agree that xenons are excellent.

spwolf

xenons are going to die out, only older models still have them. LEDs used to have worse lighting but there are now models with very good LED light. IIHS tests them all so you can see there I guess.

For instance new 2019 ES will have adaptive LEDs that can turn off any of 20 individual LED lights on each light, to decrease glare... before this was available only on very expensive models, now it is available to the masses basically.

RNM GS3

Johnhav430

I just got curious, so I looked up a headlamp for a 2018 750 BMW...the list is $3,539.26, per side. Remember the old days on the forums, where someone would say something happened to their headlamp (adaptive HID) and they were out $1,400? I guess that ship has sailed!

LED is likely already better in high end applications, but my gut says the marginal benefit v. marginal cost is not there, and may never get there....RIP xenons! I am a fan...(how cool are electrocution stickers under the hood? Don't see those with LED)

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

xenons are definitely going to disappear from new cars. i had adaptive xenons on my jeep grand cherokee summit which were great. my new g90 has adaptive leds and they're AWESOME. i think the early days of LEDs were not as good as today, but i could be wrong.

SW17LS

LED technology is moving really fast. Having had the same car with HIDs and LEDs, I preferred the HIDs at first but now that I've gotten used to them I really like the LEDs. The LEDs in my car are way behind what they are doing in cars now...

LED has less parts to go bad, less expense for all of us.

mmarshall

My experience, in more recent years, has been that the way the bulbs are actually installed in the vehicle's front end, and how they are adjusted in how they throw their light-beam-pattern down the road, makes more of a difference than what kind of actual HID/Xenon/LED bulbs or hardware used. The one major exception, IMO, was several decades ago, when the old incandescent sealed-beam lights from the 60s and 70s were replaced with halogens. The halogens were a big improvement, no matter how you had them adjusted.

Och

iTrader: (3)

There are different implementations of HIDs and LEDs. To the OP - you're driving an LS430, which at it's time had the best HID optics that were highly sought after by people that were doing HID retrofits. So if you compare it to cheaper implementations of LEDs, of course they are going to be better. But higher end LEDs have surpassed HIDs and only getting better.

All in all its a pretty complicated subject, and you need to learn a bit about lighting to understand how different technologies work and their ups and downs.

rominl

iTrader: (4)

10 years ago the LED on the ls600hl was the first and not really that good at all. but nowadays, when designed right, LED performance is better than HID. only matter of time before HID is gone

Aron9000

Agreed. I've driven some cars with halogen headlights that are EXCELLENT, 2012 Camry(1st year of that body style) comes to mind because I have a good bit of seat time in that car at night.

Fizzboy7

The Lexus LED loaners I had seemed decent. But I didn't notice a huge improvement over my IS xenons. Only thing bad about the xenons is they are expensive to replace when burned out, and the brilliance is lost when the headlight lenses start discoloring. I'm sure the same can be said for the LED's over time.
Question: Do the LED assemblies dip up and down when you first turn them on (the self-check)? I do like that feature with my xenons.