doug, did they have a purple/blue cut off or just white all the way?

 

Does anyone else notice the strobing effect of the rear LED lights on Cadillacs? They need to increase the frequency on them.

 

LED lights won't require the ballast (high voltages) like HIDs, which means you can flash your lights at someone much more easily (to warn them of cops, or of an unsafe vehicle condition, or just to let them know their brights are on).

 

flashing hid is easy due to the projector shield. has nothing to do with the ballast

 

audi r8 does not have LED lights for the main headlights, only the top-end LS

 

When you flash HIDs (basically, turn them on momentarily), they take a moment before flickering on. LEDs respond much more quickly.

 

no car uses separate HID high beams, unless you know of one. it's either halogen or bi xenon low beam projectors.

 

Or you just use a bi-xenon shutter mechanism to "flash" into another lens. You are right though that HID's are otherwise useless for instant-on applications.

Those LED headlights may look as bright or brighter than normal headlamps but I doubt they are throwing as much total light (area lit) yet. I have held Audi's prototype LED headlight assembly in my hands before, a triple-tiered row of big LED units (1 W each x 14, IIRC) on a big shaped heatsink (outsourced to one of my sister-companies in Austria).

 

As someone else pointed out, it's beneficial when you're flashing someone to pass or tell them their lights are not on. That's all. I noticed that when you do flicker the high beams on cars with hid lights, both the hid and the high beams turn on if it's not a bixenon unit. If it is a bixenon unit, it still has that slight delay of warming up if you're lights are not already on.

 

I think this is why the LS uses multiple projector lenses to spread out the beam pattern. Because with that setup, it lights up as much as the road as do hid's as far as I could tell.

And because it's still using projectors, it does have that nice little blue/purple cutoff.