LED replacement bulbs for halogen headlamps have been on the market for years, but always with strings attached. For a long time, it was a nudge-and-wink disclaimer, “for off-road use only”. Then a few years ago, a few bulbs from legitimate makers started getting approved for use in certain headlamps on certain cars in certain countries. Now — at last! — the world’s first ECE-approved LED replacement bulbs have been announced.
This story started about 15 years ago in the Fall of 2011, and only very recently came to a conclusion with amendments to UN Regulation 37. Replaceable halogen and filament (incandescent) bulbs must comply with R37 requirements to be used in a vehicle’s safety lamps — all regulated lamps, which means most every lamp on the outside of a vehicle. Unapproved LED bulbs have long been offered in the aftermarket, enabling consumers to degrade traffic safety with glare, improper light distributions and colours, RF and EM interference, and other problems.
GTB and GRE started to work on an evolution of R37 to provide for the approval of safe, effective LED bulbs to replace filament ones — called LED retrofit light sources, or LEDr for short. In October 2017, GRE established a task force on substitute and retrofit light sources (TFSR). In June 2022, R37 was officially updated to provide for LED replacement bulbs that would be safe and effective in any lamp designed to take the corresponding filament bulb. And now, in May 2025, ams OSRAM have announced the world’s first such bulbs.
This means owners of vehicles not factory-equipped with LED lamps can now to benefit from real advantages of LED technology, such as the increased lifetime (up to 6× longer), reduced power consumption (down to ⅕ that of a filament bulb), and perceived advantages such as cool white ‘daylight’ 6000K colour from headlamps.
The new OSRAM LED bulbs are designed and type-approved to replace H11 halogen bulbs in headlamps and fog lamps. It’s a big leap over the last big announcement in this field, which was LED bulbs approved at the individual-country level (Germany, France, Austria) on a specific-lamp, specific-vehicle basis. That started with H7 bulbs, then came H4 and others.
This homologated H11 LED bulb is primarily aimed at the aftermarket. Plans are for the product range to be expanded to include fog lamp bulbs (H8, H16, and HB4) in 2026; high beam bulbs such as H9 and HB3 in 2027, and additional types (H1, H4, H7) in 2028 and beyond. This aftermarket product range will complement OSRAM’s OE vehicle LED light sources type-approved under UN Regulation 128, the eXchangeable Light Sources (XLS) such as LR5, LW5, and LY5. Both product families will be showcased at DVN Japan workshop next month. Registration is open, so hurry and sign up — you won’t want to miss this!
Sincerely yours,
