Quote:
Originally Posted by Ricky Bobby
2 things kill the LED units, heat, and cold monitoring checks.
If you disable the cold checks at startup so they aren't flickering every time you start the X you will get more life out of them. Once an LED fails there is no "repairing" of it.
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I know this issue has been done to death but as a point of clarification, it is not the pulsing of the LED’s during the cold monitoring checks that causes the issue per se.
It is the fact that BMW's implementation of the lamp check momentarily reverses the polarity of the voltage during the cold monitoring phase. If you splice a suitable diode in series with the LED’s you can still have the cold monitoring enabled without causing any issues.
The biggest killer of these types of LEDs is actually caused by being overdriven which causes excessive heat. Many manufacturers deliberately overdrive, or run the LED module in these units at its absolute maximum to extract as much light as possible, and to be competitive with other manufacturers. Unfortunately the LED driver circuitry is built into these LED modules so there’s not much the average Joe can do about this.