Troubleshooter: Let there be light!

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The single vehicle feature that brings more complaints, letters, social media posts, rants, and raves than any other has to be headlamps. This growing body of expressive drivers is almost equally divided into two camps: those who don’t think their auto headlamps are powerful enough, and those who can’t stand excessive glare from oncoming vehicles. The latter has become enough of an issue that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety now includes a headlamp glare rating for new vehicles, and automakers can’t earn the top spot unless their lamps earn a superior score when it comes to not blinding oncoming drivers.

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Our aging and night sight-challenged driving population has driven automakers to come up with better light designs with more illumination and better defined light patterns. HID (high-intensity discharge) and LED (light-emitting diode) lamps are examples of this lighting evolution. When a headlamp system is designed from the ground up, these more powerful lamps don’t present any problems to oncoming drivers, but trouble does arise when consumers try to convert existing lamps on their current rides.

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Troubleshooter: Let there be light! Back to video

Here’s the catch. HID and LED headlamps work by emitting their light forward through specially designed lenses that focus and aim the light in a specific pattern. Most standard headlamps have bulbs that emit their light to the side and rear of the lamp, where the reflective concave surface at the back does the focusing and aiming. Stick an HID or LED bulb in one of these and you end up with a great wash of unfocused light guaranteed to make you one of the most hated creatures on the roads. Ontario took the right road when they outlawed any HID conversion on any vehicle back in 2017. If the factory didn’t build it, then you risk major fines and having your vehicle permit rescinded until the lights are put back to original condition.

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Still, there are lights that can be safely converted from incandescent bulbs to LEDs. If your headlamps have a lens tube in them with a thick rounded lens at the forward end (known as projector lamps) then you should safely be able to do the upgrade to LED. There can be hitches with carmakers’ products that have lamp-outage warning systems. As LED lamps draw much less power from the vehicle’s electrical system than incandescent bulbs, certain vehicle computers may interpret this as a non-working lamp and thus trigger a dash warning. Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, and Volkswagen are likely to be in this group. This doesn’t mean you can’t use LED lamps, but you will need to have special resistors installed to prevent the warnings.

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As well, some LED kits can cause the lamps to flicker unless the correct ballast is used with the conversion kit. Most credible suppliers will be able to let their consumers know which electrical add-ons are required for their vehicles. If you’re thinking of doing your own conversion (and yes, there are plug-n-play kits) make sure you have plenty of room at the back of the headlamps. While LED lights don’t develop much heat at the working end of the bulbs, it’s another story altogether at the back. Here they create enough heat to require either metal heat-sinks or small fans to dissipate their thermal overloads. These devices require some room, and you don’t want the fins of a heat-sink to come into contact with anything meltable.

If this type of upgrade doesn’t work for you, I’ll be the first to suggest that your next appointment should be with an eye specialist.