If you tackle this project, there are many things to watch out for.Ī first problem is that with cars nowadays it can be really difficult to get at the various bulbs. When I tried that, I found that no single store had all of the bulbs I needed, and even traveling around to three different local stores, I was not able to find them all. Yes you could go to your local auto parts store to try to find these LED bulbs. Note carefully that some bulbs are red and some are yellow. And then I went to Amazon and ordered up LED equivalents. The way I did this was by studying the user manual for my car and writing down all of the bulb types. Turn signals, running lights, tail lights, all of them. If you are going to go to the trouble to do this, you might as well also swap out as many other bulbs as you can. Okay so hopefully I have convinced you to swap out those bulbs. It’s just much more noticeable than incandescent brake lights. You can immediately pick out the cars that have LED brake lights. Look at a few car brake lights the next time you are driving around and you will see this for yourself. A brake light that lights up instantly is more noticed by the visual cortex than a brake light that gradually changes from off to on over a tenth of a second, because the first derivative is higher in magnitude. It turns out that the human visual cortex is optimized to detect the first derivative (calculus again!) of the brightness of things. There is also a physiology-of-perception aspect to this. You give the inattentive driver behind you an extra ten feet to react to the situation. So if you swap out your incandescent brake lights for LEDs, you might avoid some car accident where some inattentive driver behind you rear-ends your car. How far does the car behind you, speeding along at 70 miles per hour, travel in a tenth of a second? Turns out, about ten feet. If only you were to replace the incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs, the brake lights would light up instantly. The tungsten filaments heat up, and about one-tenth of a second later, the brake lights light up. The chief reason we care about this is that when you tap the brake pedal of your car, it closes an electrical switch that sends an electric current through your brake lights. But my car is just old enough, and just inexpensive enough, that all of the tail lights, brake lights, turn signal lights, and running lights are old-fashioned incandescent bulbs. Many new cars these days, especially the more expensive cars, use LED bulbs almost exclusively instead of traditional incandescent bulbs. Why did I do this? Mostly because it reduces the risk of someone tail-ending my car. Recently I went through the process of replacing most of the incandescent bulbs in my car with LEDs.
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