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I swapped in some LED headlight bulbs on a whim, after seeing how they improved the lighting in our other cars. Of course the halogen H3's look like yellow candle light now, even with the 100W H3's in both fog and aux main beam sections. I grabbed a couple different extra-bright H3 LED pairs for evaluation on Amazon, installed them on the driver's side but left the halogens in the passenger side. Took the following pictures against the garage door to show the beam pattern (great) and whiter color (great) in comparison, and show the similar total light levels. Again, LED's on the left, 100W halogens on the right. Fogs, then the aux main beams (high beams).
20240430 LED Fog Bulbs 2.JPG (2.41 MiB) Viewed 4673 times
20240430 LED Aux Main Beams.JPG (3.99 MiB) Viewed 4673 times
The real fun started when I started removing the right-side lamps, and one, just one, of the four screws was seized/corroded. Knowing that the screw threads into a brass insert molded into the housing, I started out with a succession of screwdrivers with more force, but the screw was in there solid. Not so much twisting that it might damage the insert or spin it in the plastic. I ended up using a left-hand drill bit in the rounded screw head, very low speed, hoping the screw would break loose when the bit grabbed the head. But it just did the drilling not the grabbing or unscrewing. Once the head was off, I was able to work the front section off the housing, then remove that housing to the bench. Soaked in Kroil for a few hours, the stub of the screw came out with just a little twisting with Vise-Grips. I found some machine screws 4x18mm at the local Ace Hardware, but also ordered some stainless fillister head screws and washers for the final fitment. Same size and heads as the factory screws, but no rust this time. Anti-seize on the threads this time too. I'll replace all eight, and never look back.
I have not yet found the perfect option, unfortunately. I've tried four different versions so far, and decided on the least-poor of the presented option. The challenges, as you may already know, include the shape and alignment of a filament vs. the LED emitters. The lamp reflectors are relatively small, so even small differences dramatically change the shape of the light pattern coming out. I use the fog lights as pseudo DRL's, and the larger scatter for those is actually desirable for that duty. For the aux main beams/high beams, the LED's I've tried so far offer no direct forward emissions, so the quality of the reflected light beam is completely dependent on the correct emitter alignment. The LED's aren't really cutting it there compared with what they replaced, but are acceptable especially considering the limited duty the car sees these days. They work fine for flash-to-pass duty though.
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TL;DR --
In my car, the LED's are replacing 100W halogen bulbs, well beyond the 35W fog and 55W aux main beam bulbs fitted from the factory. The factory wiring wasn't up to the extra current flow, so I'd fitted new larger wiring in parallel with the factory stuff. The aux main beams had a separate relay added to 'unload' the contacts in the $$ lighting relay. If you've added high-output halogen bulbs but not improved the wiring, you are probably missing out on a lot of the extra light otherwise available with the 100W bulbs. The 'solution' might be with better H3 LED 'bulbs', but those will need to have physically smaller but more intense LED emitters, carefully placed to be in the same position in the reflectors as the filaments are with halogens. I haven't found those yet.
The logical next option is to install LED projectors in all the front lighting, both for the H3 lighting in the bumpers and for the headlights. Both require clear lenses rather than the fluted factory glass. It wouldn't be tough making the lenses in plastic, but there are some durability drawbacks especially for the lenses mounted low in the bumper. A downside of projectors is that they seriously alter the original look in front, particularly in the headlights that are on very prominent display even while they are parked. I place a pretty high value on maintaining originality, are at least making it easy to revert back to original with no scars or other evidence things were altered. It was extra simple to remove the added wiring in front with the LED bulb installation, for instance, and there is no evidence that anything was ever changed.
FWIW, all mods performed on my car are carefully documented in the car's logbook, so future owners or repair techs will have those details to supplement the factory docs if/when they need to troubleshoot something. I've too often been the victim of prior-owner hacks, and decline to be that curse on future owners. There's a special place in he!! for perpetrators of half-fast fixes and especially wiring hacks on any car. I'm just the caretaker, please.
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Amazon very graciously allows me to test a lot of things, in return for honest reviews. It's up to the individual suppliers to decide if they want to offer samples for those evaluations, though, so I don't get to test every H3 offering you might see. The H3 bulbs are not currently on my selections list, mostly because the 'right' solution won't happen until some big improvements happen in the LED emitter technology. Plus, H3's in particular struggle with heat dissipation. There isn't much room behind the installed bulbs, and there's no air circulation available in the sealed housing that holds the lamp assemblies. If I were starting from scratch, the housing would have an aluminum rear, and the LED assemblies would offer a contact patch for thermal transfer from an array of projector elements in front. But that would alter the original and iconic front appearance, particularly the headlights that are so distinctive to the model.
If/when you do find H3 options you like, please be sure to share back your findings. This posting was more focused on the screws and the too-common issues that many report when trying to remove them. But more on the H3 bulbs would help many owners. Assuming they can get those screws out...
