Shine the Light

By Dan Calabrese

Although law enforcement and first responders praise the brightness and durability of LED emergency lights, industry experts say the financial numbers for LED headlights don’t yet add up.

They last longer, use less energy and give off more light, so it’s no surprise that original equipment manufacturers are installing more light-emitting diode – LED – lights virtually everywhere on new truck models.

Except in the front.

“We haven’t really seen the market itself start to request or try to pull us into that arena,” said Tony Heard, chief engineer of the body interior and components group at Navistar Inc. “On the commercial truck side, we haven’t had any customers at all knocking down our doors asking us for that technology.”

Part of the problem is that the value of LED lighting is in their long life, and it’s hard to realize that value if you part with your truck long before the LED investment pays off, as is often the case with owners of over-the-road trucks.

The cost premium for LEDs over other lights varies widely depending on the application, said Dan Wells, director of exterior systems at Freightliner LLC, part of the Daimler Trucks North America group. For headlights, LED lights are seven to eight times more expensive than halogen with a replaceable bulb. For marker lights, LEDs can cost up to four times more than the more traditional incandescent lights.

“The requirements from our customers are for bulb life,” Wells said.

“They don’t want to have to replace the bulbs more frequently than necessary, which would lead to LEDs. But they also want value and cost of ownership over the life of the truck, so where we have customers who will keep the truck for four years, there’s no way we can offer an LED headlight that would make economic sense to him.”

But what about users of light- and medium-duty trucks, who keep their trucks much longer? Even there, Wells said, the economics do not yet add up. An over-the-road owner might change halogen bulbs 16 times over the life of a truck -- worst-case scenario – at $8 per bulb at an auto parts store, for a total of $256, Wells said.

“For many [medium-duty] customers, it would be less than half that cost, given they buy bulbs in bulk and get a much better price, and their night driving mix is lower than 50%. We currently do not have LED headlamp designs from our suppliers that we could offer for less than that $256 dollar premium,” Wells said. <

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