Halogen bulbs are sources of light of headlamps of most of the vehicles running around the world. To get better night vision, vehicle owners want to replace the conventional halogen bulbs with HPLEDs without replacing the conventional headlamp assembly. Though High Power Light Emitting Diodes (HPLED) are efficient sources of light for replacing halogen bulbs, conventional headlamps are not designed for HPLEDs and so replaced HPLEDs will fail within a short duration due to poor cooling. The aim of this work is to develop a compact cooling system for a conventional headlamp assembly to accommodate HPLEDs. An air cooled system with a compact heat sink is proposed in this work. To decide the dimensions of the compact heat sink various heatsink sizes were modeled and simulated in ANSYS. For this study, a popular SUV's headlamp is chosen and complete tests were carried out in absence of external lights on a flat black surface for about 28 meters. The light intensity is measured in terms of lux for Halogen and HPLED's horizontal passing beam at various test points. For generating the same intensity of light, it was found from the experimental results that the HPLED consumes only one third of the energy supplied to halogen bulbs. With the proposed cooling system the junction temperature was reduced by about 25% when the cooling fan is operated at laminar flow conditions. On the other hand, the luminous intensity of the HPLED improved by about 30.9% due to the decrease in junction temperature. The HPLED headlamp reflector inner wall temperature is found to be 49 % lesser than Halogen bulb headlamp reflector inner wall temperature. © 2020, Journal of Thermal Engineering.All Right Reserved.