Eli5 Why modern car headlights are designed as single units and not modulararly like in the past, making it so replacing the whole unit now being required if the LEDs burn out or the glass/plastic gets damaged?
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Older incandescent light bulbs have a very limited life. Typically a few hundred to perhaps a thousand hours of use. Since a car would outlast the light bulb, it made sense to design fixtures that allowed for their replacement. Bulbs were also fairly unreliable – they could fail any time.
Modern LED lights can run for tens of thousands of hours and rarely fail. As such, mechanical incidents aside, the LED light will have a good chance of outlasting a car. By designing the entire light as a replaceable module it is simpler and cheaper and probably better quality to outsource the design, manufacturing and testing to a company that has this expertise.
It is also rather expensive and time consuming to replace the LED and the associated electronics (the old type bulb simply needed 12V power and a socket to screw in) so giving a “user replaceable” LED option just makes the module more expensive. To replace a $5 bulb in a $100 old light assembly makes sense. To replace $50 LED/electronics in a $10 modern light assembly makes much less sense. Replacing the entire light assembly saves the end user repair money and time. (also most service/repair depots won’t have electronic repair capability)
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