Your knowledge of LED headlights is limited which makes the usefulness and accuracy of your comments regarding them limited.
I would counter that I know more about LED headlights, more about LEDs, more about the law, more about the blue light and lumens issue, more about how the human eye works.
All you are doing is making absolute statements when there are other truths that should be presented.
Because it's absolutely true that the retrofit drop in bulbs are illegal and cause more glare. No one can dispute this.
I am giving useful information so that people that decide to install LED headlights will at least know what to consider when choosing a particular bulb.
Which is encouraging them to break the law and cause more glare on public roads. It's all an excuse to drive faster. Think about it, if you were only going 2MPH, you could get by with a pocket flashlight. The faster you go, the more light you need, so you feel it is important enough to drive faster that you don't mind more fatalities. Despite all the improvements in vehicle safety and switching more to LED headlights, vehicle fatalities are at an all time high and half of them happen at night when there are far fewer people on the road. We could blame alcohol or some other factor, but glaring LED headlights are the only thing that has changed much in recent years.
Everything you mention about LED headlights as a negative are also present in the LED headlights that are legal in every new vehicle that uses them.
No, the other difference (besides not being illegal) is that the manufacturer tests them to be DOT compliant. Merely eyeballing it after you threw money at some illegal product and declaring it "good" is not the same. That's more of an ego thing that you are satisfied and don't care if they meet specs, which they probably don't if they allow you to see much better using incan housings.
If replacement LED headlights for halogen bulbs meet the same criteria as those installed in new vehicles then there is no reasonable justification from a performance aspect to not use them as replacements for legacy bulbs.
Except they don't, meet the same criteria which is being legal to use and being tested for DOT compliance and performance. We both know you did not test your lights, if for no other reason than that the cost of equipment to do it, exceeds the value of your vehicle.
The fact is many LED replacement bulbs today are manufactured to provide the same beam pattern as OEM bulbs and they do not blind oncoming traffic.
The fact is, no LED replacement bulb can provide the same near-360' emission. They can tell you they do, and you are very eager to believe it, but there is no way to make one LED, which at best would have nearly a 180' beam, become a 360' emission. If you place multiple LEDs pointing different directions to try to get 360', then it still doesn't work because they are ALL, now not centered at the focal point of the reflector. It can "almost" work with projector beam if there is the right combination of collimating lense, but LED retrofit bulbs are not designed for this if it's a retrofit for a standard incan bulb type and housing.
They have the same color temperature and intensity as LEDs found in new vehicles from the factory.
Based on what? Their claim? How much do you really trust the claims of companies selling something illegal? Of course they're going to tell you it's extra special good. I know with certainty that you do not have the equipment to test whether they have the same intensity found in new vehicles from the factory. You are simply making up fictional arguments when you pretend they are magically the same. If it were that easy to make them the same, OEMs would just throw LED drop-ins into their existing incan housings, not spend $1M++ into developing integrated LED headlights. The obviousness of the truth should be sinking in right about now.
The only reason they aren't legal is because the NHTSA has decided to sit on their arse and not update their regulations for decades regarding legacy bulbs. Many of the aftermarket LED companies that provide LED headlight bulbs have done their homework and are providing LED bulbs that do perform responsibly.
There is no such thing as responsibly selling an illegal product. They simply throw marketing nonsense at you and you want to believe, when there is no evidence that they are magically equal to OEM factory LED headlights and every reason to believe they are not, besides the one factor of also using LEDs.
They aren't legal because consumers don't have the testing equipment to make statements like you did, that they must magically be as good as OEM, before we even get into the issue of the OEM having problems too.
Let's face facts. You do not have any data that concludes that your lights perform in any way like an OEM, LED light does. You hoped we would not notice this completely fictional claim.
OEM LED lights don't have the same beam pattern as this generation of Explorer, so even if you had an LED bulb that exactly replicated the beam pattern that the stock incan bulb has, you don't have the same beam pattern as an OEM LED headlight, including intensity, so it is doubly impossible.
What you have instead, is an illegal product, where the seller told you everything is good, and you want to believe it despite it being impossible for it to provide enough illumination benefit to bother, without producing excessive glare. I've mentioned about a half dozen reasons by now and all you can do is pretend they are just like OEM headlights which they obviously are not.
