Next year several car manufacturers will have them for headlights. Has nothing to do with glowbull warming, they are just better more efficient lights.
They are fantastic for BEAMED light applications, but they suck hind teat for general illumination applications (i.e., room lighting).
I have a 3W Rayovac 2/AA white LED penlight in my pocket. It is insanely bright. If I aim it at your eyes -- with your eyes closed as tightly as you can scrunch them closed -- you will NOT be able to tolerate the light. It's that bright.
If aimed at a reflectorized road sign in broad daylight from about 50 yards away, the sign will light up brightly. It's that bright.
But, if I unscrew the reflector, and try to use it as a "candle", it puts out less light than a real candle. It's that DIM.
These are very amazing sources of light -- and VERY specialized. Don't hold your breath waiting for usable, affordable, equivalent-to-real-bulb LED lighting.
I have a 200 lumens CREE X-Lamp, 3.4v at 1 amp draw, it’s bright. You can get one similar a Lowes, it’s called a Task Force 2C CREE X-lamp 60x brighter — It’s about 150 lumens out the front and has a focusing optic. I modified mine with a newer more powerful CREE Q5 bin LED, should give 200-240 lumens out the front.
Focusing lenses, phosphor coatings and arrays help with the dispersion. You can design the optics and coatings for throw or diffuse light, just depends on how you do it. The new car lamps will use arrays, the new stop lamps use multiple LEDS in a socket. Dealing with light output is going to change with LEDS, just turning on a filament and wasting 95% of the energy isn’t a good idea. Most incandescence bulbs depend on phosphors to give the diffuse light, they call them softwhite, same with LEDs.
Today there are a lot of street traffic lights that are LED arrays. They cost a lot but the maintenance costs are much reduced since the replacement cycle is greatly lengthened. They just replaced all the ones in our city with LEDs. They are also doing parking garages.
One thing you can count on, as they ramp production, the LEDs will be cheap ... Semiconductor technology always works this way. Whether it will equal the incandescent cost, probably not because of the added electronics, but life cycle costs will greatly favor the LED. You should see 10-100,000 hours.
CFLs are a ridiculous solution, capered to LEDs.