Indicator Bulbs Explained

This page identifies and explains everything you need to know about Indicator Bulbs on your vehicle.

What Are Indicators?

Indicators are used to indicate what direction you are wanting to take. They make other road users and pedestrians aware of your intentions and they have been around since the early 1900’s as trafficators.

Indicator bulbs are typically located in both headlight units next to your dipped beam and main beam, rear light units and they will be located at the side of wing mirrors on many modern vehicles.

When To Use Your Indicators

To be road legal, you have to have working indicators on your vehicle. It’s an absolute must because indicators are an essential accident preventing measure on the road.

You should always use your indicators whenever you are changing lanes, turning off a roundabout, turning into a separate road and any other time your vehicle is making a change in direction.

The use of indicators also comes with commonsense which should always be applied when driving on the road.

Can I Upgrade My Indicators?

Many drivers’ want to upgrade indicator bulbs on their vehicle to make them brighter meaning their vehicle is more visible on the road.

There are plenty of options available for upgrading car bulbs such as:

• Upgrade Halogen Indicators

A wide range of indicator bulbs are available to improve the brightness of your indicators.

The bulbs types available are single or double filament and can provide more vision, better styling or you can opt for longer lasting bulbs.

• Upgrade LED Indicators

Led indicator bulbs provide a brighter light yet they use much less power when compared to halogen.

There are more colour choices available with this technology and the bulbs can reach even more brightness.

When choosing LED, you may experience issues with CANBus errors however you can buy bulbs with CANBus technology already built in or there are LED resistor kits available.

LED Hyper-flashing

Hyper-flashing or “rapid flashing” occurs when you change the technology for your car bulbs from halogen to LED. This is because LED bulbs use less power than standard halogen bulbs and this causes a drop in the circuit’s resistance. When this happens, your bulbs will appear to flash really fast hence the name “hyper-flashing”.

It’s very frustrating when this happens and can cause drivers to panic.

If you have upgraded to LED and you’re experiencing hyper-flashing then you might need to try a resistor kit or change the bulbs for these hyper-flashing resistant LED’s.