LED lighting, can it provide better MPG?

Created June 25, 2006, at 8:01 pm by Anonymous

Any auto / electronics experts out there...

Does replacing all of a vehicle's lamps with LED's (light emitting diodes) provide a measurable effect in raising MPG?

Also, do HID (High Intensity Discharge) headlamps place a greater load on the alternator that standard halogen headlamps, thus lowering MPG?

Thanks for any input

Anonymous says:

2 years ago

One of those conversion factors we should all remember is that 747 watts = one horsepower. My recollection is that regular automobile headlights typically run about 75 to 100 watts. So if you turn your headlights off, you save 200 watts, or less than a third of a horsepower. Replacing your headlights with lower-wattage LEDs would have such a minor effect on your MPGs that you couldn't measure it outside a lab and wouldn't notice it on the road.

By the way, there are engineering details and other problems with LED headlights - see the article in Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlight - it talks about LEDs about two-thirds of the way down.

Anonymous says:

2 years ago

Thanks for the input

What about the HID vs. Halogen lamps though?

Anonymous says:

2 years ago

Watts are watts - your generator / battery doesn't know or care whether the light is a HID or a Halogen lamp. In either case a few hundred watts is a small fraction of one horsepower and will have an insignificant effect on your mileage.

Anonymous says:

2 years ago

Thanks. I heard somewhere that you need a ballast to start HID lamps, and I was just interested (since the Toyota Prius has all of the packages, the top most having HID lamps).

But anyways, thanks for the input. I thought of replacing all of my HCH's brake and turn signal lights with LEDs, but you helped to show that it would have been a waste of money.

Joel from Indiana says:

31 weeks ago

LEDs won't show significant gains in fuel economy but that doesn't make them a waste of money.

LED lights have a significantly longer life than the incandescent bulbs in most vehicles. In many cases, they'll last beyond the life of the vehicle.

They also illuminate more quickly. Approximately 2 tenths of a second. At 65 mph, that extra time allows the following driver to stop over 18 feet shorter.

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LED lighting, can it provide better MPG?

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