Those with LED headlights- Would you leave them on to act as DRL's?

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Correction to my post above... After thinking about it, I do not think I have the HID bulbs, rather the halogen. My cost at the dealer to replace the bulbs were about 100 bucks each (mainly labor), not the 600 bucks plus I have read from other post regarding the HID issues. I have an optin level-2 Prius and not the touring.

 

Why go through all that work when you can just leave the headlights in the "on" position all the time? That's what I do. The car automatically turns them off when you power off the car. It sounds to me like that's what you're trying to accomplish with a re-wire.

 

No, it wouldn't be a problem because they'd rarely need to run the heater on the lights and the labor savings come from reduced bulb replacement.

 

Full headlights represent a small but very real loss of energy and mpg. The much lower power consumption of the LED DRLs is another incremental step towards energy savings.

For safety, I did leave headlights on full time on my two cars that had auto-off lights but not DRLs. But on the 2012, I immediately converted to DRLs. The only serious problems I've been seeing with DRLs and lack of taillights are on the cars with traditional reduced voltage headlights as DRLs, where the headlight pattern fools some less perceptive drivers into not noticing the difference. LED DRLs don't have a headlight pattern, so don't put enough light on the pavement to fool these drivers.

 

Very close to the actual mechanism. The electrons repel each other when they move, so the force (voltage) that pushes on one end of the wire causes a step change of force that travels down the wire at just below the speed of light in a vacuum (light speed is slowed down when traveling through a medium, e.g. slower in glass or plastic).

The hose analogy is good. In this case the step change in pressure travels down the full hose at the speed of sound in water (about 10 times faster than the speed of sound in air) so there is a small, measurable delay in the flow at the far end of the hose.

JeffD

 

I think the answer to all this is, if the car has LED's as headlights it's perfectly fine to leave them on all the time as DRL's. This does not shorten their expected life or performance for the duration of owning the car. So why not?

Suppose you want half bright headlights for DRL's. Duty cycle is how they control brightness of LEDs all the time in other areas of the car. A "dimmer" LED is really on at the same full brightness but only 50% of the time, say, cycled at perhaps 100Hz. That's a hundred on/off's PER SECOND. The ratio of time on to time off is your perceived brightness. They're playing a "trick" with the slow "phosphorous" effect of your retina. It takes a while for our eyeballs to register the amount of brightness hitting them.

There's been an argument of having LED's or not as standard issue with the car. .. because of the cost of having to replace one "if it burns out". Yes it would be expensive, but the more normal case headlight replacement will be as a result of crashing into something. Even having LED headlights and having to replace them in this event will be the least of that related expense!

Maybe having DRL's on will help prevent having to replace your headlights, because that motorbike stayed stopped at the intersection instead of shooting out in front of you because he saw the DRL's.

 

It's pointless for the 2012+ models because they all have DRL. If I had a 2010-2011 Model V (Five) I would run the headlights for sure or purchase an LED DRL kit.

 

We 2012 v owners wish...

 

Snap! I should have looked at which forum I was in first... LOL