Let’s start with xenon. The main advantages of this type of lamps are unprecedented brightness and amazing visibility, that is, the road has no chance to hide a turn or a hole from your eyes. Fairly long service life. A quality xenon kit will outlive a similar halogen one and even his great great great great grandchildren. The average lifespan is four years, not bad, really?
Very decent efficiency, during operation, only 7 percent of the power is spent on heating the lamp itself, the rest is directed to servicing the main task, that is, lighting the roadway. The absence of a filament implies that there is nothing to shake and break in a xenon lamp, which means that you should not be afraid of mechanical damage to the device from shaking..
But not everything is so rosy, there are significant disadvantages. First, the price. Real xenon with all related equipment in the form of a control unit can cost very decent money and it makes no sense to put it on Russian-made cars. Plus, after a couple of hundred hours of operation, the spectrum of emitted light can change significantly towards yellow, and lamps are also expensive.
Secondly, xenon light adversely affects the retinas of oncoming drivers, and automatic heading angle controls are needed to use it. Thirdly, xenon lamps contain mercury, which tends to slowly evaporate.
Let’s move on to opponents. The main advantages of LED lamps at the moment is their unusualness and appearance. And of course, an almost unlimited service life, that is, there is a very high probability that LED lamps for a car will last much longer than the vehicle itself. Brightness is also nothing, impressive, the spectrum is very close to daylight. And they are very visible during the day. But…
They are a lot, they just unreasonably dissipate power to produce heat, and heated glass can burst even from the first drops of rain. Engineers, of course, are struggling with this issue, trying to arrange mini-radiators or fans in the headlights, but so far it has not come to a sane result.
Without a doubt, the future belongs to LEDs, subject to their refinement, and at the moment there is no alternative to xenon lamps as a bright and stable source of illumination, despite all their terrible shortcomings, so purposefully poisoning our health.