About a year ago one of my tail lights went out. The car was still under warranty, so I took it to the dealer and they replaced it, and told me that they replaced the whole light because one of the connectors melted. Then the same thing happened to the other light about a month ago. I was able to salvage that light by scraping the melted plastic away from the connector.

To reduce the amount of heat generated in the tail lights and hopefully avoid this happening again, I decided to replace the three 21W bulbs in each tail light with LED bulbs that only draw 5W. I used these:

https://www.superbrightleds.com/more...ofit-car/1326/

Red for the top and bottom (brake lights) and amber for the middle (turn signal). I initially used the 1156-R30-CBT light, but it wasn't as bright as the stock lights in direct sunlight. These are equally bright.

I took a video to show the difference between stock and the LEDs. The brake pedal is pressed and the hazards are on so both turn signals blink. Stock on the left, LEDs on the right. Here's a GIF:

https://imgur.com/hUVfNbd

When I had a red LED in the turn signal slot, the stock light looked slightly amber by comparison. The amber LED is far more amber than the stock color though. I don't know, maybe I'll replace the amber LEDs with the same red bulbs that the brake lights use.

No errors from the computer and I didn't do any coding. I'd say the LED brake lights match the 3rd brake light pretty well.

 

Hey bud, I know this is a little late, but did you have any error codes or issues with the bulbs

 

 

Hi, a bit late, but could you point out which one you purchased on the page ? There are quite a lot.
Did you buy their resistor ? It's not specified canbus, so i'm a bit confused.

Thx

 

https://www.superbrightleds.com/more...edirect_disc=0

Guess the other link stopped working. I’m using these in all three bulb positions. I decided red looked better for the turn signals than amber. Part number is 1156-R26-CBT. Looks like it’s discontinued, unfortunately. It’s a canbus light so I didn’t need to buy a resistor.

Never had a problem with these bulbs installed, though! Seems like a good mod to keep the tail light connectors from melting.

 

It looks like this is the replacement for these:https://www.superbrightleds.com/more...retrofit/4255/

I am thinking I will order three pairs of these to see how they look. I am going to go with Red for the top bulbs, Amber (natural) for the indicators, and White for the reverse/rear fog bulbs on my R55.

 

Those are only 70 lumen, whereas the ones I’m using are 130 lumen. I started with those and didn’t think they were bright enough, just FYI.

 

You can buy an adaptor to then fit t15s in there that can be brighter. I did that with flashing brake light leds from Alla Lighting in my old setup. Nice to see a fellow light enthusiast

 

I actually ended up going with the natural white (4300K) versions instead of the color tinted ones. My Clubman has color tinted lenses on all of the housings in the tail lights. I installed them and compared stock 21W to these and they looked equally bright. Since I can code I could have gone with no "CANBUS" bulbs and just coded out the errors but I didn't. (btw, I really hate that term. The bulbs have no CANBUS items in them. The FRM is simply looking for a resistance in the range expected to verify the bulb filament is not blown. Since the LED bulb has a different resistance, it reads as a blown bulb. The bulb makers get around this by adding a resistor between the input leads to present the expected resistance to the FRM, but I digress).

I am still waiting on the reverse light from ECS tuning. I also ordered their interior LED kit and their driving lights. Looking forward to getting those in as well.