Has anyone experimented/used LED bulbs in place of their 1157 bulbs? It seems like a nice upgrade to get brighter brake lights, but I am sooooo confused by all the offerings on the web. From $2.99 to $29.99 a piece! The claims that cheaper bulbs is not as bright and we should splurge for the higher cost ones makes sense, but who do you trust?

Many years ago I paid close to $100 for a pair of PIAA superwhite headlight bulbs for my W124 with American headlights. Liked them well enough for the white light, so I was sad when one of them burnt out years later. In a pinch I put in a $5.99 bulb until I can re-order the PIAA. Guess what? I cannot tell the difference. I've been running one PIAA and one el-cheapo bulb for years now, frankly, I don't remember which side is the more expensive one. The poor American headlights on the W124 probably doesn't help.

That's why I'm hesitant to splurge on the LEDs now. I spotted $29.99 set of 10 on eBay. I'm tempted to get that batch and have plenty of spares!

one advantage you get from LED brake lights is their "instant-on" nature, compared with incandescent bulbs.

the difference between the times it takes for an LED bulb and an incandescent bulb to achieve full brightness is probably in the order of tens of milliseconds, but you'd be surprised at how finely the human eye can discern the difference, and the instant-on lights somehow take on a more "urgent" appearance to the driver behind you.

you can spot the difference between the two, when observing the brake lights on cars that have ordinary incandescent bulbs on the stoplights in the rear lamp clusters, and LED bulbs in the center high-mounted stoplight.

I think the w124's have a dash lamp for a bulb out and this light will illuminate if you replace your regular bulbs with LED's, in addition to this if you replace your turn signals they will blink very quickly due to the voltage drop (LED's consume less power than filament bulbs)....Also the quality of light will be poor due to the tail light housing (reflector) in the w124s... I think there is a vendor on ebay that sells LED Tail Lamp housings..... I bought a set of LED's and the quality of light was horrible, could barely tell they were on.

The single bulb replacements don't put out as much light, and don't put it out evenly - that is, they don't light behind them where the reflector bowl is. You can try it out but you may be disappointed. Also if you have cruise control and/or "light out detector" they may not work right unless you put in a resistor to soak up the current so that the total current of the LEDs (which will be less) and the resistor is about equal to that of the lamp (some of the newer and more expensive LED replacements actually have these resistors built into the base, I saw one of these somewthere on the Internet).

I made an LED taillight in my third tail light in my '86 560SL, but it uses 18 of the largest, brightest and most tightly focused LED's I could find on eBay. I made a circuit board for them that spaces them out evenly, 6 in 3 rows, and it just fits into the housing. The resistors are behind the panel in the third taillight housing. This turned out great, it's actually brighter than a bulb. But of course, it wasn't a screwdriver job, either.

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