Interior Exterior
Q:
Took the light off to inspect. It's completely sealed. Guess that'll be a warranty replacement. Just curious if anyone else had this happen to them.
A:
Took the light off to inspect. It's completely sealed. Guess that'll be a warranty replacement. Just curious if anyone else had this happen to them.
one of the issues that has popped up with the now prevalent LED based lighting on many new vehicles is exactly has happened to you. manufacturers are experiencing some intermittant failure on on sealed assemblies due to heat issues. the problem is that the newest LED's are 5000 and even 10000 mcd which is very bright but also can get very hot. many assemblies now actually have a heat sink attached to help dissipate excess heat.
not to say thats what happened as i have not even had a chance to look at the new assemblies up close. it could be any number of issues including defective solder joints, over voltage/current condition or even a bad yield at the fab plant that manufactures the diodes. typically a properly designed LED fixture will outlive the vehicle as the newest LEDs are rated for 100,000 hour life.
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Hopefully, this is isolated and doesn't turn into a recall that Lotus doesn't need right now. I believe a set of those retail for about a G. Other than heat, I have also heard that LEDs are frequently over-driven with voltage to increase light output. This, of course, can dramatically reduce their service life.
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Please be specific. Is this a high mounted brake light on a 2005 or the new brake light/ taillight on a 2006?
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The new light on the 06.
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It could be heat or current but I doubt it.This is most likely a quality issue related to assembly. Most likely soldering gone awry. Hopefully it won't become a common issue. This is the same problem that has occurred in other applications including outdoor solar lighting and in large LED panel displays. Fortunately, the loss of a single LED does not result in a nonfunctional tail light.
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that's funny LEDs are supposed to be low heat generators becuase they are highly efficient. Unless the light itself is heating up the surrounding area.
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ok, anyone got inside the trunk pics of the '06 tailights. I hope this is a isolated problem.
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that's funny LEDs are supposed to be low heat generators becuase they are highly efficient. Unless the light itself is heating up the surrounding area.
LED's do generate far less heat compared to an incandescent light bulb but the principals of physics dictate that as you run current through a semiconductor, the internal resistance of the diode will dissipate some of that energy as heat. the greater the current running through will cause a proportional increase in heat.
normally this is not an issue with regular indicator type LED's with their low operating current but the newest high brightness LEDs can still get hot. additionally, the majority of the heat is concentrated at the center where the silicon is which can be problematic since the surrounding plastic body is innefficient at conducting heat away. while you wont see 1500 degree temps as you would at an incandescent filament, a bright LED typically will reach a junction temperature of 90-120 degrees centigrade depending on how much current is being passed. ambient temperatures also factor in to the equation as the LED current must be dropped in relation to how warm the outside air is.
OEM manufacturers have resorted to incorporating a specialized IC based LED driver/heatsink combo mounted directly to the light cluster. the chip will automatically adjust the applied power while monitoring both the diode temperature and the ambient temperature so that the voltage and current are constantly regulated to keep the LEDs operating within spec. with such a setup, one will easily get 100K hours lifetime with high reliability while also compensating for the LEDs tendency to slowly dim over its operating life.
unfortunately not all LED lighting is designed and built this way. some OEM and most if not all aftermarket units are nothing more than an array of LEDs and a current limiting resistor. they tend to suffer high failure rates due to things like voltage spikes or overvoltage conditions or even heat related failure on a 90 degree summer day.
A:
the voltage spikes seen in our cars are not likely to blow an led, LEDs generally blow from current spikes. If, as you suggest the manufacturers are using a current limiting resistor then a voltage spike would be associated with an increase in current. A simple current limiter (which I use for most of my led projects) can consist of a single transistor (LM317) and an appropriately sized resistor. Retail these can be had for less than a buck and in bulk the price would go to 20-30 cents. The idea that lotus speced this thing out without proper current limiting (the cost of which would be less than a dollar) while selling the parts for close to 1000 bucks seems crazy. But it is lotus after all (if it fails it isn't engineered enough and if it survives it is overengineered).
In any event, I stick with my earlier suggestion that this is an assembly related quality issue and not a design issue. But we will have to wait to find out
Perhaps we should meditate on this, repeat after me ohm ohm ohm ohm ohm ohm ohm ohm