Pokerhobo

However, the lifetime of a LED bulb is significantly longer. Best I could find online is a xenon bulb has about 2000 hours lifetime while an LED bulb is between 15000 to 50000.

electron mike

Nice pair of GT cars, and brilliant driveway! I have a stone patio like that, but yours is the first driveway I have seen in flagstone!

Sorry, back on topic I got the standard lights with no nipples. Don't really like the chrome housing, wish is was darker like on my 981 GT4. LEDs next time.

c1pher

I had the base headlights in my base Boxster. My Macan has the PDLS+. I won’t get anything less than PDLS in the future. If you don’t drive much at night, it’s no big deal. The first time I drove the Boxster at night in the woods with no background lights around, I thought I was driving a 1970 Trabant....with one headlight. It’s not that bad of course, but after that I almost never drove the Boxster at night without high beams on all the time.

Westcoast

Agreed, if you NEVER drive at night headlights are never an issue, but if you do and have experienced PDLS or even more with PDLS+ you understand immediately what you are missing!

beemerb0y

A lot of over exaggeration in this thread. The base xenons are perfectly fine for night driving. 90%+ of the cars on the road have more inferior headlights and the general public is doing just fine.

I think Porsche failed with the upgraded headlights by putting the washer nozzles on the bumper. I prefer the clean, slick, nipple-less look.

Westcoast

Your opinion...

Your opinion again... so we should all settle for less I suppose, just run with the heard?

AFAIK you are wrong here, IIRC in Europe the headlight washers are required by law once a certain light output is exceeded...

Zhao

That's one part of it but there is a bit more to it.

The big reason to care about how long they last is to save money. Both will likely last the life of vehicle, but the LED housings fail not for the bulbs themselves, but for the components in the housing. Every time I see a LED tail light fail it's not the individual lights, but the entire unit that goes down. Never seen a LED bulb fail in a headlamp but I see stuff like the DRL strip flicker or fail, or the whole unit just crap out. It is pretty rare, but it does happen.

Your average LED tail light assembly is about $1000, and front headlamp assemblies range between $2000 and $7000 each. LED lamp assemblies are sealed units, so if your DRL strip fails you or there is a fault in your tail light board, you don't replace the specific component/bulb, you replace the entire housing. So 9/10 or 19/20 (or whatever the number actually is) save money, but one guy gets absolutely screwed with a bill of thousands when it could have been a few hundred (HIDs) or 5 dollars (halogens).

It's possible this results in saving money on average, but I doubt it as manufacturers have been very good at skyrocketing the average repair cost of vehicles in the last decade to far out pace inflation (I do have insurance stats for that).

minn19

I could be wrong here to, but I thought it also had something to do with them not getting as hot as halogens. So you need the washers to help clear snow/ice also.

ipse dixit

Do you have stats for how often Porsche headlight housings (either LED, Bi-Xenon, Halogens, or whatever) actually fail outside of OEM warranty period?

If the housings fail during OEM warranty period, who cares.

Outside, it might be an issue. But what's the failure rate after 4 years (or 50k miles) of ownership? Because to me that's the only relevant metric in terms of cost of replacement, otherwise, who cares.

UncleDude

I watched this video a few times when I was looking at this option. I like the more complex look of the LED’s, and the wider spacing DRL’s. The washer nipples don’t bother me, and my reading indicated that they’d be the best available at night for this model. So it was one of the few options I chose.

minn19

I have nothing to back this up with, but I like that the DRLs are more distinctive over the usual ones we see everyday. In my mind at least it helps people see them better than the more “common” looking ones.

Curvehound

On a BMW, the full capability of the adaptive headlights can be activated via coding changes and there are a number of other things that can be improved through coding as well (ie remove the auto-start stop). If you dont know how to do it, there are a number of people who you can pay to do it for you - you can find them on bimmerpost or just google them.

My sense is that coding a P car is not as easy and I am not sure why.

badprognosis

Hey WC,

From your comment are you implying that the Spyder PDLS+ in Canada does not have the active matrix variable high beam dimming? The Spyder configurator describes the LED PDLS+ with the more crude high beam assistant but doesn't mention the active matrix functionality. As you indicated the 911 configurator calls it LED-Matrix PDLS+ and indirectly acknowledges the presence of active dimming by saying it is not available in the US. My SA says what we get in Canada is different than what is spec'd in the US meaning active matrix but I'm not confident that he has the most accurate information regarding the Spyder/GTS 4.0. Might as well get the answer from someone who has the PDLS+.

Westcoast

That is correct the LED PDLS+ on the GT4/Spyder is not an active matrix system, but rather just a LED light source as opposed to HID or Halogen. As far as I know the beam shaping active matrix system is available on certain 911's and other models like the Taycan and Panamera, just not the 718 family at this time.

Zhao

TLDL: it's probably a non issue unless you plan to keep the car forever or you are on a super tight budget (probably aren't buying LEDs on a Porsche then anyway).

Unfortunately no. Insurance tracks and shares data on a lot of stuff but I don't see manufacturer or model specific stats that detailed, and only Porsche would track that specific metric. I know rough numbers on my shop's stats though (we fix about 2000 cars a year, average age of vehicle is 4.3 years old, average repairable insurance claim as of last month was about $4300 dollars, so I have a large enough pool of data for what our shop sees for failure rates to get a picture)

What I usually see (collision side of things, collision shops take on the warranty for anything to do with the accident after) the failure rate of a housing is likely to happen very quickly if it's going to fail. Most of the times it's going to be within a month or 2 of it being replaced, and more commonly right out of the box from the manufacturer. I rarely see anything fail after that time period, and if I do it's almost always a tail light.

IMO that's good news, as that tells me if there are problems with quality control they become apparent very early while it still has a warranty. It might even be better still as my theory is all manufacturers dump their rejected assembly line parts on the replacement part market. The stats are probably no worse than 1/50 that fail in that 2 month period, which sounds bad but is actually pretty good because most are DOA. If it makes it past 2 months I'd ballpark the failure rate is around 1/200-1/400 in the next couple years (and remember most of these are LED tail lights for what I see fail in this period). The downside is the tech is still too new to know what the failure rate will be going far into the future when cars are 10-20+ years old. The other downside is in Canada the collision warranty is only active as long as the customer owns the vehicle and most people do not keep their car very long so after a few years I couldn't guess accurately what happens. So there potentially is a good number of vehicles that have had failures years after replacement but I never hear of because they're in the hands of new owners. However, I'd say this is probably a non-issue (if almost nothing fails in 1-3 years it probably isn't going to fail in 4 or 6 or 8 years from a defect).

From a pure dollar perspective the only thing that would keep me from getting LEDs is if I planned to keep the vehicle forever, just because odds are good they will fail someday and if you're dealing with a guaranteed failure it's better to spend 200-400 for some HIDs at most a couple times over 20 years vs $5000 for a housing that now doesn't match the other side of the vehicle and makes it look like your car has an accident history. If I planned to keep it <10 years I personally think the risk of failure outside of warranty in that time period is so minor I wouldn't even factor it in. If someone is on a tight budget and can't absorb a random 5g hit though, prob best to skip them and get HIDs.