Houm, good points. I suppose Im taking for granted 20/20 hindsight...I had no way of knowing and it could have played out differently: Id be crying that my $800 bulbs are dying from years of abuse/poor design.

Projection Xenon bulbs have been around for a long time now, but I still haven't seen a single one on the street burned out. Anyone else?? Ironically, I have seen a few Audi DRL LEDs out which should be even more reliable.

 

They are certainly more common now than 10 years ago when I bought my LR3. I had some meetings with some Engineers at PACCAR (they make Peterbilt and Kenworth heavy trucks) and they'd been using Xenon for a while. I got some MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) data from them and based my usage on that.

They don't really "burn out." The anode or cathode fails from the arc cycling so many times.

 

Oh of course - but as a general rule the graph is very telling and it was based on average use - so at 5 or 6 years it was mostly useless as a "premium" or "upgraded" light technology because it matched the output of halogen essentially. The vehicles still have good optics so many wouldn't really notice at first, especially because few of us bought them new and those who did saw a slow decline in output anyways.

..by 10 years though? That's another thing, and why I had to finally pull the trigger and swap mine even though they were perfectly reliable, no flicker, no color shift (well they were probably 5500k vs like 4500k but nothing insane purple like the old Acura 1st gen xenons hahaha) and 100% perfect start up every time.

They seem greenish white compared to before but that's just how they SHOULD have been. From the sides, the ellipsoids still make them appear blue/purple.

For $80 every 5 years it's a small price to pay for having a good looking lighting system. Not much beats a freshly waxed white Land Rover with those blueish purple xenon headlights.

Also, most of these OE manufacturers have hot-strike protection and I think it's mostly a myth from the early retrofit xenon kit days that you can significantly damage them by cycling them excessively - it shouldn't let you do that really.

Haha this drove me INSANE! And while I'm not TOO overprotective of the xenons, I DONT want to re-ignite them for zero reason when I shut my car off, especially when they were on during the day.

If you shut your lights off BEFORE you turn the ignition off, it bypasses the "follow me home" feature. I usually run my parking lights (have the '14 LR4 LED blackout tail lights and LED front parking lights, so might as well run them) but even that triggers the follow me home BS and turns on the xenons!

Kinda true but LONG before that the bulbs become virtually worthless through color shift and decreased output, especially with matched pairs of bulbs shifting and changing at different rates. I hardly EVER see an actual failure ie. like light OFF. It just looks like crap or becomes dim.

 

Agree: the "end of life" for the Xenon is ~70% of original Lumen output. "failure" is a burn-out at the anode or cathode. The loss of output is FAR more likely, as you state.