Bright white light sources are of significant importance for automotive front lighting systems. Today's upper class systems mainly use HID or LED light sources. As a further step laser diode based systems offer a high luminance, efficiency and allow the realization of new dynamic and adaptive light functions and styling concepts. The use of white laser diode systems in automotive applications is still limited to laboratories and prototypes even though announcements of laser based front lighting systems have been made. But the environment conditions for vehicles and other industry sectors differ from laboratory conditions. There for a model of the system's thermal behavior is set up. The power loss of a laser diode is transported as thermal flux from the junction layer to the diode's case and on to the environment. There for its optical power is limited by the maximum junction temperature (for blue diodes typically 125 - 150°C), the environment temperature and the diode's packaging with its thermal resistances. In a car's headlamp the environment temperature can reach up to 80°C. While the difference between allowed case temperature and environment temperature is getting small or negative the relevant heat flux also becomes small or negative. In early stages of LED development similar challenges had to be solved. Adapting LED packages to the conditions in a vehicle environment lead to today's efficient and bright headlights. In this paper the need to transfer these results to laser diodes is shown by calculating the diodes lifetimes based on the presented model. © 2015 SPIE.