switch all your lights to LED!!!!

Super bright, nice light pattern and not too blue like a lot of others. Build quality and fit and finish is very good, above average. Overall very nice for the money.

Many new cars these days, especially the more expensive cars, use LED bulbs almost exclusively instead of traditional incandescent bulbs.  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.

Why do we care about this?

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.  The tungsten filaments heat up, and about one-tenth of a second later, the brake lights light up.

If only you were to replace the incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs, the brake lights would light up instantly.

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.  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.  You give the inattentive driver behind you an extra ten feet to react to the situation.

There is also a physiology-of-perception aspect to this.  It turns out that the human visual cortex is optimized to detect the first derivative (calculus again!) of the brightness of things.  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.  Look at a few car brake lights the next time you are driving around and you will see this for yourself.  You can immediately pick out the cars that have LED brake lights.  It’s just much more noticeable than incandescent brake lights.

Okay so hopefully I have convinced you to swap out those bulbs.

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.  Turn signals, running lights, tail lights, all of them.  The way I did this was by studying the user manual for my car and writing down all of the bulb types.  And then I went to Amazon and ordered up LED equivalents. Note carefully that some bulbs are red and some are yellow.

Yes you could go to your local auto parts store to try to find these LED 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.  Mail order is the way to go, I think.  Plus it was cheaper at Amazon