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My wife’s 2018 Land Rover Discovery looks something like this:
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with at least one important difference, related (albeit not directly) to the topic of this writeup: hers doesn’t have fog lights. They’re the tiny shiny things at the upper corners of the front bumper of the “stock” photo, just below the air intake “scoops”. In her case, bumper-colored plastic pieces take their places (and the on/off control switch normally at the steering wheel doesn’t exist either, of course, nor apparently does the intermediary wiring harness).
More generally, the from-factory headlights were ridiculously dim yellow-color temperature things, halogen-based and H7 in form factor. This vehicle, unlike most (I think) uses two identical pairs of H7, albeit aimed differently, one for the “low” (i.e. “dipped” or “driving”) set and the other for the “high” (i.e. “full” or “bright”) set. Land Rover didn’t switch to LED-based headlights until 2021, but the halogens were apparently so bad that at least one older-generation owner contracted with a shop to update them with the newer illumination sets both front and rear.
On a hunch, I purchased a set of Auxito LED-based replacement bulbs from Amazon for ~$30, figuring them to be a fiscally rationalizable experiment regardless of the outcome success-or-not. These were the fanless 26W 800 lumen variant found on the manufacturer’s website:
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Here’s an accompanying “stock” video:
Auxito also sells a brighter (1000 lumens), more power-demanding (30W) variant with a nifty-looking integrated cooling fan:
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When they arrived, they slipped right into where the halogens had been; the removal-and-replacement process was a bit tedious but not at all difficult. I’d been pre-warned from my preparatory research (upfront in the manufacturer’s product page documentation both on its and Amazon’s websites, in fact, which was refreshing) that dropping in LEDs in place of halogens can cause various issues, resulting from their ongoing connections to the vehicle’s CAN bus communication network system, for example:
LED upgrade lights are great. They’re rugged, they last far longer than conventional bulbs, and they offer brilliant illumination. But in some vehicles, they can also trigger a false bulb failure warning. Some cars use the vehicle’s computer network (CANbus) system to verify the functioning of the vehicle’s lights. Because LED bulbs have a lower wattage and draw much less power than conventional bulbs, when the system runs a check, the electrical resistance of an LED may be too low to be detected. This creates a false warning that one of the lights has failed.
Here’s the other common problem:
A lot of auto manufacturers use PWM (or pulse width modulation) to precisely control the voltage to a bulb. One of the benefits of doing this is to improve bulb life. These quick, voltage pulses (PWM) do not give a bulb filament time to cool down and dim, so for halogen bulbs the pulses are not noticeable. However, with an LED bulb, these pulses are enough to turn the LEDs off and on very quickly, which results in a flashing of the light.
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Philips sells LED CANbus adapters which claim to fix both issues. Auxito also says that it will ship free adapters to customers who encounter problems, albeit noting (in charming broken English):
Built-in upgraded CANBUS decoder, AUXITO H7 bulbs is perfectly compatible with 98% of vehicles. A few extremely sensitive vehicles may require an additional decoder.
I’m delighted to be able to say—hopefully not jinxing myself in the process—that I’m apparently one of those 98%. The LED replacement bulbs fired up glitch-free and have remained problem-less for the multiple months that we’ve used them so far. The color temperature mismatch between them (6500K) and the still-present halogen high beams, which we sometimes also still need to use and which I’m guessing are closer to 3000K, results in a merged illumination pattern beyond the hood that admittedly looks a bit odd, but I’ve bought a second Auxito LED H7 headlight set that I plan to install in the high-beam bulb sockets soon (I promise, honey…).
I’ve also bought a third set, actually, one bulb for use as a spare and the other for future-teardown purposes. In visual sneak-peek preparation, here are some photos of an original halogen bulb, as usual accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes:
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and the LED-based successor, first boxed (I’m only showing the meaningful-info box sides):
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and then standalone:
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For above-and-beyond (if I do say so myself) reader-service purposes, I also scanned the user manual, whose PDF you can find here:
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And with that hopefully illuminating (see what I did there?) info out of the way, I’ll close for today, with an as-usual invitation for reader-shared thoughts in the comments!
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
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