Ford Super Duty Headlight Premature Bulb Failure Explained

2011 through 2022 Quad Headlight Overview

The third generation of the Ford Super Duty 2011-2016 began using the quad headlight system. We have good success with this halogen to LED migration. Then with the model change to the fourth generation 2017-2022 the Ford Super Duty 250-550 initially presented a problem migrating from halogen to LED lights.

The truck uses a quad light system. Each light emitting hole uses an H13 halogen bulb. When a user engages the low or high beams, all four lights brighten or dim. That is an entirely different methodology than most vehicles on the market that have seperate low and high beams. The most common bulbs are H11 and 9005 for high and low.

We were having great success with a simple change of the halogen bulb to our LED H13 upgrade for the 2011 through 2016 model years. Then in 2017, the system changed. We found that the 2019 Ford Super Duty F250-F350 was causing our bulbs to fail. It was the most prominent year to produce that result. It seemed to ramp up and and then after 2021 it tended to dissipate.

Diagnostics - We diagnosed that the vehicle was producing up to 22 volts on our volt meter. Our bulbs were designed to handle 6-16 vDC. The truck was over voyaging our bulbs and causing them to prematurely fail. The addition of decoders did not fix the problem. We asked our contacts about what had changed and finding empirical information failed to yield results. After some time, we concluded the CANbus was modulating electricity. With the ever changing load within the vehicle, it tended to adjust the voltage to the lights.

We spent a few years testing bulbs and decoders and eventually found that with our invention of the RapidAim bulb that was designed to handle 7-40 volts, the problem went away.

At this time, only our RapidAim part #21131 is designed to handle the increased voltage. Once we are comfortable this fix is long term, we will migrate the Xtreme 22131 to the higher voltage rated.

At this time, the 21131 is the only bulb that is approved for the 2017-2022 Ford Super Duty.

Update - We have found that the 2023 and newer Super Duty F250-550 now use an H11 Low (upper hole) and an HB3 (9005) as the High (lower hole).