Are your car's eyes LED?

At the back? Makes you infinitely grateful to be living in these electric times – or for the birth of men like Thomas Edison, come to think of it.

Imagine the perils of driving at night in the 1800s – always worrying that your car might catch fire because of the open flame of your headlamp, or that said light might be snuffed out by a wayward gust of wind or splash of water.

I mean, can you imagine – an open flame in your car? Might as well slap on a couple of bumper stickers saying “ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN” or “BEGGING FOR IT.” And all for a piece of tech that could only nominally light your way. Thank heavens there was no traffic those days. Say it with me: conflagration.

So, given those Flintstone days of automobile history, we are certainly spoiled little brats for choice. It’s true that we creatures of the road rarely think about headlamps unless they’re busted, or some idiot is bearing down on us on the opposite lane with his beams on high.

Take HID or high-intensity discharge (also known as xenon) headlamps. The pristine bluish-white beams can be irritating or sublime depending on which side you’re viewing it from. For nerdspeak watchers, automotive website ridelust.com describes HIDs as “metal halide arc lights which use two tungsten electrodes to arc a power electric charge. This charge interacts with the gases inside and vaporizes metal salts present in the bulb, producing a plasma that emits a very intense light.”

Dizzy yet? What is very important to note is that “contamination like dirt or dead bugs on the lens can cause a great deal of glare to be directed up and towards other motorists.” This means that owners of said HIDs need to be responsible for them or risk seeing more motorists flip them off.

Given all the high-tech effectiveness of the HIDs, a new kid on the block is threatening to take over.

In high school, part of the curriculum in our school asked us to make electronic projects that entailed soldering components onto printed circuit boards that we made ourselves by “etching” the boards in ferric chloride. Quite a few of those assemblies involved small muti-colored nubs of light that, we were told, were called LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. Not only did these LEDs come in a variety of colors; they also didn’t heat up like traditional incandescent lamps.

From those heady days of juvenile creation, you might say the LED dragon has properly entered the automotive scene.

While credit for the first use of the LED on wide production-use headlamps belongs to Lexus (on its LS600 in 2008), Audi (locally distributed by PGA Cars) is widely regarded as the voracious, avid user of the innovation on its models. It is now a brand seen as a vanguard in LED headlamp technology.

PGA Cars public relations officer and motorsports manager Menchie Ramirez maintains that LEDs are highly superior to usual halogens because “it is energy efficient – presently four times so. By 2018, we expect it to be eight times more efficient. It also has an indefinite service life and reacts up to 10 times more quickly than traditional incandescent bulbs.”

More than that, Ramirez says that LED bulbs are environment-friendly because they do not contain mercury.

Aesthetically speaking, “The advent of the LED also opened tremendous creative possibilities for interior and exterior lighting design due to its size and material. Bundling several LEDs allows construction of modules, known as LED arrays. These are extremely flat, compact, and require less space than conventional light sources. It allows designers to realize complex lighting functions in tightest spaces such as cornering lights, for example.”

Ramirez also points out that LEDs are a lot better than HIDs because “they are easier on the eye as they do away with bright high beams that can be distracting.”

Another advantage of the LED is that (as mentioned) they do not produce too much heat – owing to a lighting process does not require heating up an element. A couple of the challenges though are, according to ridelust.com: the need for sinks for the heat that comes from the back of the lamp, and the temperature sensitivity of the LEDs, which means they deliver “different light levels at different ambient temperatures.”

Audi, however, “recognizes the potential of the LED technology. We utilize it in such a way that it gives our models their distinct look and character. A number of light emitting diodes can be combined to create distinct shapes that can characterize a particular model. For example, on the A4 and A5, the look is determined, elegant and dynamic. For the Q5 and Q7, the lights appear broad and powerful. In the R8, the lights give a ‘charging bull’ character bursting with vigor and pride. All models are now recognizable at a glance. Also, it opens possibilities for interior and exterior design where it can easily be incorporated into areas that need more flexibility thereby allowing more freedom for design concepts. This gives us an edge over our competitors,” narrates Ramirez.

Even Kia is, well, seeing the light. The new 2011 Sportage SUV that will be unveiled to the Philippine market soon features daylight running LED headlamps. “They are an additional safety feature of the vehicle,” says Boying Soriano, Kia Philippines marketing services manager.

Soriano continues that Kia expects to have more models using LED technology. “They provide an extra measure of safety while driving your vehicle in all driving conditions. Just like seatbelts, which were optional 20 years ago, I see LED daylight running headlamps to be a mandatory safety feature for all cars in the near future.”

As with other new technologies, automotive LEDs presently don’t come cheap, but there is good reason to believe they’re going to be on the headlamp assemblies (and most everywhere else) of more vehicles to come across more automobile brands in the very, very near future.