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I think you are missing one of the fundamental principles here to get this working... (No, I'm no expert, but I know something not mentioned in the thread...)
With the incandescent light the direct light from the bulb out through the headligth is used for near lighting, ie the part of the beam directly in front of the car... The reason is that the distance from the bulb to the lense (glass in front of the headlight) is short... The light bouncing of the back wall and being focused has much longer distance to the lense and just like with a pair of binoculars you can then focus them a lot longer ahead of the car...
The difference between high/lowbeam is the same principle... The lowbeam is a filament closer to the reflector, with a shorter and wider beam (still with two parts) the highbeam is a narrower filament, longer from the reflector... That means the near lighting is worse (weak, scattered) but the longer focus means you get a good long distance beam... Usually the bad near lighting of the highbeam doesn't matter since usually the lowbeam stays on and you just add the highbeam to throw the light further at the same time...
The problem you guys need to solve is that the LED's have a very, very short range on their own... Not even close to the lowbeams range... If you look at captainslugs images above, the spot in the middle is the light of the sides of the bulb being focused in spot that further away becomes a wide cone of light...
Take the same images and put the wall at twice the distance and the LED's will fail to light it...
I can tell you without experimenting that the small round LED's will not work in any headlight, what-so-ever unless you create a whole array of mirrors, prisms and replaced the front glass completely... The amount of lumens or mcd is irrelevant as the range of the focus is to short...
The larger LED's like the Luxeon Star come with a lense that focuses the light... Stick another lense in front of that one and re-focus them, and use say 2-3 of them as near lighting and 3-4 as far lighting and you could potentially make a decent lowbeam out of it... The reason being that you actually have the space to make a prismatic lense fit in the headlight housing to focus them... I'd say that would be a far better idea and probably less costly as well...
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