LED headlight?

This thought just popped up in my head, anyone know if somebody tried to hook up a whole bunch of 5W Luxeon Stars and use them as headlights for automobiles? I would imagine if you look at them when they are turned on, they will have the same look as the H.I.D lights on fancy import cars, although I'm not sure if they will give off just as much light.

Tim

i think costwise it would be prohibitive to make it. you'd need LOTS of them to put out out the legal minimum, which means lots of power and heatsinking, then the issue of throw, since LEDs are more flood in nature. HIDs do better i'd think. however, they do super in taillamps!

http://www.candlepowerforums.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=002414

And there was another thread which had something like 40 LS's, but I just can't seem to find it.

i've actually had several friends ask me if i could build led headlights for them!

at this point, they just aren't bright enough, i am seriously considering making fog lights for my car and my dad's snowblower though.

HID efficiency is so much better, and less expensive, there's no point. At least for white light. For red brake/signal lights I think it can be worthwhile. For amber signal lights, it's still ridiculously expensive to get adequate brightness, compared to incandescent bulbs. (Not that this stopped me. My car's forward lighting is all non-filament now - HID bi-xenon hi/low beams, and LED signal lamps.) I still have a pair of H3 fog lamps on the car but I don't use them, and they'll be removed when my turbo intercooler gets installed. The fog lamps are kinda pointless when the HIDs work so well, and the beam cutoff is so sharp that you don't have to worry about backglare in fog/rain.

Check out the Dodge Tomahawk concept motorbike

Steve

Looks like a fun ride, but you'd be a fool to drive it at night. 12 5W LEDs at a nominal 120 lumens each - so you're burning 60W of electricity to produce only 1440 lumens of light. Contrast that with a 35W HID producing 3200 lumens. (40W total due to ballast, but big deal.)

If I were designing a motorcycle with a top speed of over 400mph, I would install headlights that would give me at least 5 seconds reaction time. That would be about 2930 feet, over half a mile. HID headlights can achieve that. 12 5W Luxeons can't.

It's not just a question of energy efficiency (where the LED is clearly inferior to discharge lighting) but a question of the maximum practical amount of light in the minimum mounting volume. HID wins on both counts though.

I think the Dodge Tomahawk is a pretty neat concept, the barest minimum amount of framework around a big engine. Kind of like the design of the A-10 Warthog, the barest minimum airframe built around a huge anti-tank gun. (It's not a plane with a gun, it's a cannon that can be flown. The Tomahawk isn't a bike with a big engine, it's an engine with a couple drive wheels and a seat.)

But using Luxeons for headlights on this concept was a mistake, and is purely for new-wow factor instead of for actual performance. A shame, because with an engine like that you would expect the rest of the vehicle to be pure-performance oriented too, and in this department it's clearly not.