Replace incandescent bulbs for LED bulbs in Taillights

[Cheap Guy]

In short, it’s not worth it for several reasons:

1. Not much difference in appearance. If you want to change the look of your lights, probably best to get new LED taillights. At best, the LED bulbs flash a little quicker; that’s it.

2. Not much brighter. I got the 270 lm and they weren’t noticeably brighter than the incandescent bulbs.

3. The resistor gets hot and there’s not a lot of space to mount them. Since you have to use two of the plug and play harnesses, with four resistors, it would be really tough to mount the resistors to metal.

I guess you can get LED taillights for about $100 more than the total cost of bulbs and harnesses, especially if you go with the basic ones. That’s probably the best way to go.

[camguynj]

The stock 3157 bulbs are 400 lumen. 270 lumen is not bright enough in a LED bulb due to most LED output is centered instead of all around 360 as incandescent bulbs are. You can use 3457 bulbs which are 500 lumen which are just barely brighter than stock.

There's really 3 decent LEDs options. All of which are expensive.

Diodedynamics 510 lumen https://www.diodedynamics.com/tail-l...maro-four.html but you need to buy quality plugNplay resistors harness from another vendor.

ScreamingChicken 510 lumen (the Diodedyamics bulb) but with there own generic 3157 plugNplayharness https://screamingchicken.com/2010-13...l-light-bulbs/

VLEDS Triton Red LEDs 300 lumen but they have a round design. They also offer proprietary plubNplay resistor harness that only works with their LEDs. https://www.diodedynamics.com/tail-l...maro-four.html

[Cheap Guy]

^^^^Thanks for the links. I really like the harness for in the second link.
Again, these would be about the same price as the complete LED lights but the ones I’ve seen are just a bit too fancy for me.

[camguynj]

Welcome. I've looked a lot for a good LED bulb replacement option and those are the best I've seen. I've tried various LED bulbs but none were bright enough or gave an even brightness. One was a LED that was housed in an incandescent bulb. It gave a nice even brightness but at only 280 lumen it wasn't any brighter than stock. Too bad, if it had a little more lumens it would be a big winner. Yes that Screamingchicken harness is sweet.

[Cheap Guy]

Wow. I spent the past few days pricing out LED bulbs and the associated harnesses and it came out to about the same or even more expensive than just buying complete LED taillights.

So I returned everything and going to try the basic eBay LED lights. The afterburner/sequential stuff is just too fancy for me.

[Cheap Guy]

Ok, so I tried playing around again with LED taillights again but using my Jeep as a guinea pig, I using load resistors mounted to the body. The resistors heated up too much for my liking. There’s a lot more room behind the Jeep taillight housing and even an opening at the bottom so I can only imagine how hot it would be in the Camaro. With the high lumen bulbs it was again going to run over $150 and I just think it isn’t worth it even if it worked properly.

Gonna return everything and use the money on something else. Maybe a new grille!