Ok, thanks. That is what I have expected. I guess, I can say something substantial regarding that issue.
First, icing of LED headlights only happens in a small temperature window of about 2°C to -6, maybe -7°C. That is because snow is very damp then so that it sticks. Below that temperature it is not sticky anymore and it will not cobble in a manner that it really means a problem. I was in Lappland, Sweden, over New Year and in January and we had around -40°C. I use the Nolden 7" LED headlights and I had no problem (actually I create a video regarding this subject, but it is in German). I only saw clogging on the headlights after entering Sweden in the south and on my way to Karlstad, where I drove through regions around -5°C.
(German:
https://matsch-und-piste.de/wintercamping-in-skandinavien-erfahrungen-tipps/ )
The second issue supporting snow clogging up is the mounting situation. If it is funnel-shaped snow can't get away to the sides and starts to clog up from the edge to the middle. Modern cars often uses headlight shapes that bent to the side and have nothing where snow is stopped and can clog up. Snow is simply blown aside. So icing is an issue, which 4x4 fans driving cars looking like a wall and it seems we must accept the physics here...
Third, icing is a problem with LED (in that mentioned temperature range) but why there are no solutions in the market, just very few in the aftermarket? The foremost reason is CO2. If you are a car manufacturer with hundred thousands of cars, every single Watt more power needed increases the overall CO2 footprint. At least for the European Market (don't know about US, Africa and Australia) a manufacturer needs to keep the fleet emission (CO2 emissions over all registered modells) low. Otherwise penalty fees of 100 Euro per Gramm per car exceeding the allowed maximum are to be paid.
It also seems not to be a huge problem which needs to be addressed with a general solution or where more power consumption is accepted as a necessary measure. If you go to Scandinavia, you see a lot of cars, especially a lot of E-cars (which I never expected up there) which all use unheated LED (because auf their low power consumption). You can easily distinguish between the differnet light types by their colour or if you simply look at the car modell. These regions are facing several month of snow and darkness. And it works (as I said, die to the mostly low temperatures). So it seems that manufacturers and the market in general doesn't see icing of LED headlight as a problem which must be addresses (as it is also a safety issue).
There were intensions to heat the front glass of the light but all LED light manufacturers involved turned away from it. Why? The idea was to transport the heat of the LED cluster (>100°C) to the front glass. But that would have ment to use active parts (a fan). That includes two risks: passive cooling can not break. All LED lights have passive cooling. Active cooling (a fan has moving parts) increases costs, needs more space and it can break. Breaking of active cooling means an outage of the light. The second risk is, car manufacturers accepted active cooling only if the part could be repaired. That is not possible, because an integrated LED light can not be dismantled and put together again without breaking its integrity and all its photometric properties (which are essential for its homologation).
I read about a suggestion of a heated front glass. In fact there are LED lights on the market, for snow plows, which have a heated front glass. However, this is also not a preferred solution as the small heating wires in the front glas makes it far more difficult to meat the legal requirements (photometric properties, see about the grid below). BTW, these heater wires are responsible for the increased CO2 emissions I was talking about. That means more cost per unit for a problem not seen as a huge one, as I explained a few lines up from here. Aftermarket lights with heated glass which meet legal requirements are fine and whoever needs it, will pay for it. But a car manufacturer will not pay the price and increase its CO2 footprint for a problem only a few people are affected by (compared to the overall mass).
Putting a heated grid in front of the headlight is not allowed (at least where the UN-ECE regulation apply = Europe, Australia, Japan, maybe more). The homologation of a light always ends at its front glass. You're not allowed to put anything in front of that as this would change the photometric properties. There are cars which use such grids, but they a) are for emergency or military use and things like this, other rules apply here, b) they use reflector based headlights and got a homologation including the grid. As a reflector spreads the rays of light widely so that the grid only captures a few rays, you do not looose much light. A headlight with a lens bundles the rays and they start to spread on their way to the road. So a grid in front of a lens based light (LED or halogen) will cover many, many rays and thereby create big shadows on the road.
BTW, Ineos had the option to choose 7" lights so you could have exchanged them with any other 7" light on the market. And there are quite a lot, also heated ones. But the Ineos design department wanted their own design ending up in a unique size, you find nowhere in the market.
AWo
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