LED headlights provide brilliant and efficient lighting for your mobility scooter. At Pride Mobility, we include them standard with just about every model in our mobility scooter lineup.
In fact, since we’re talking about efficiency, it’s probably more efficient to list the mobility scooters that don’t have LED lighting. But at the risk of making anyone feel left out, let’s just say if you expect to ride in the dark, at least some of the time, you should have no problem finding one with a brilliant LED lighting package.
LED lights – a brief history
It’s taken a long, long time for LED lights to reach the level of adoption we’re at now. LED lights at first were far too expensive compared with filament bulbs. Even now, incandescent bulbs still hold a stronger position in the market because they’re more affordable up front.
From a consumer perspective, it took some wallet discomfort, tons of LED evangelism and big corporate investment to drive down the cost and get more people to make the switch.
If you ever stopped in the produce section at your local supermarket and noticed the veggies under soft, crisp white light for the first time, your grocer probably updated to LED lights. Maybe you wandered through the frozen foods aisle and watched the runway of freezers switch from dark to light as you went from one end to the other. First of all, your grocer is getting fancy with motion sensors, but she’s also likely using LED lights in those space-age ice cream keepers.
Another example: if your town recently updated streetlights to a cleaner, brighter bulb, there’s a good chance utility crews installed LED lights.
It’s these kinds of shifts, when buyers with big budgets bought lots of bulbs, that helped bring the LED to broader market adoption. Only big industry had the spending power to invest up front in the name of energy savings later. But their investment helped make LED bulbs to cost what they do now.
LEDs in transportation
Believe it or not, the first automobiles started using LEDs almost 30 years ago. Before that, only small consumer electronics like alarm clocks used them. They were too expensive. Even after 1993, they were only in luxury cars. Now it seems like every new car at the dealership uses LEDs in some way, if not LEDs exclusively.
That evolution has paved the way for Pride Mobility to include powerfully bright headlights – and in some cases tail lights, for example in the Raptor – on our mobility scooters.
What is an LED light?
Instead of a filament like in an incandescent bulb, or mercury gas like in a fluorescent one, LED lights use light-emitting diodes (LED). Electricity passes through a tiny semiconductor with a crystal cap that lights up when the current passes through.
Without getting too scientific, it’s a high-tech device that manufacturers are getting really good at producing in bulk, which has helped push down the price and make them more affordable for everything.
LEDs in mobility scooters
At Pride, we like LED lights on our scooters for three main reasons.
1. They’re super bright. Also, the directional nature of LEDs means our mobility scooter headlights can be focused forward and aimed to illuminate the road ahead.
2. They don’t waste energy. Did you ever scald your hand on a hot filament bulb that’s been lit for any more than a few minutes? That’s because incandescent bulbs waste tons of energy. LED lights create more light with less energy and thus less heat. With LED lights, you’re able to achieve more lighting power with less battery drain.
3. They last forever. LED bulbs can have a lifespan of up to 30,000 hours. That means your headlight could potentially last for the whole life of your scooter.
LED lights in creative scooter design
Since you can shape LED lights to create interesting contours, we’re starting to see the auto industry do really creative things with daytime running lights, or the lights that are always on when you start your car.
They use interesting shapes that load up the front and back ends with tons of personality.
Not to be outdone, we’ve started to incorporate creative LED design in some of our most cutting edge mobility scooters.
The Zero Turn 10 4-Wheel, for example, features sharp LED headlights that follow the contour of the shrouds. Likewise, the Zero Turn 8 4-Wheel includes two LED accent lights, which add character under a more powerful LED primary headlight.