When changing bulbs for the headlights and the rear lear lights I have found that when I buy the bulbs from a shop they tend to have a limited life. Now I buy OEM bulbs from the main dealer. They tend to be more expensive, sometimes twice the price. I get the impression that the bloke in the parts department thinks I'm a fool. But, they are so fiddly to replace that I'm willing to pay the extra for a good quality product. If they last twice as long then it's worth the extra. The same with key fob batteries.

The front indicator bulbs bulbs are now 11 years old without problems. When I asked the Subaru dealer for replacement bulbs to keep as spare the man said to bring the car in and the technician would know what bulb to use. I didn't argue. The bulbs are situated in such a difficult place that I think the whole headlamp units would have to be removed.

The worse problem with LED's is people who stick them in number plate lamps, they often show lots of white light to the rear and due to directional brightness are utterly useless for the job in hand.

Apart from that they look wrong, invariably car LED's are in the higher colour band, so a stark white bordering on the blue range...oh and whats with blue sidelight bulbs, is that some layby cruising code or what?...and they look how can i put it 'chavvy' on a car that should have low colour range white lights in line with its year.

The only good thing about plainly wrong lights, and stark white obviously aftermarket DRL's stuffed anywhere that takes the fancy are a prime example, is we are forewarned to give such cars an extra wide berth, it can't have escaped the notice of most BR's that such vehiclesoften tend to be driven somewhat aggressively.

Most people do get the wrong LED for the job, with a look around you can get the proper colour and low wattage to prevent the blinding effect off of number plates, size according to where its got to be used, the ones I bought always matched the colour of the lens

also if you notice some people put in white bulbs where they should be red or amber because the lens is almost clear which is not the fault of tungsten bulbs but people who install them

I was under the impression that standard bulbs would be phased out in favour of LED lights because of lower power use, which is what they are all looking at now, the bit I didnt expect was how bright they would end up being but they will phase them out soon like household bulbs are