avalanche1962

Can someone tell me if they have had this problem with their HID's? I have factory HID's and when I turn them on they come on bright and them dim down. They never get any brighter after the dim down. and you cant see hardly anything with them on. I know this cant be right. HID's are supposed to be the best lights out there. Can some one tell me what the problem may be?

TheDivaDanielle

that's the way HIDs are. When they first come on for that moment they are stupidly bright. Then they usually appear fairly blue, then settle down to regular white.

avalanche1962

Ok.. I just thought the actual brightness on the road would be a lot better than it is. Its very difficult to see at night. Doesn't seem to light up the road like I thought it should.

Norm Peterson

I think what you're seeing when you first turn them on is the high beam pattern. There is some sort of shutter mechanism that switches the pattern between high and low rather than a separate bulb or separate filament that gets turned on independently, and this shutter takes a moment to move to the low beam position. Also, the color of HID illumination tends to be a little too far away from where your eyes are most sensitive (too "blue" vs kind of yellowish, or 6k vs 4k for the brighter halogens).

There are a couple of things you can do to get more useful forward lighting with the OE HIDs. One is to stagger the headlight aim with the passenger side headlight aimed just a little higher than the left. This lets each headlight do a better job of filling in any dark regions of the other. Plan on experimenting a little so you don't get the pattern too high (particularly on the driver side), but this should not take very many tries. The other thing is to run the fog lights as well, which gives you better close-in illumination. If those aren't aimed too high either, most traffic doesn't seem to care.

I have the HIDs in my 2008.


Norm

avalanche1962

thanks very much for the info everyone.