dodge guy wrote:
Like I said. You have to get the proper bulb. I don’t believe there is a proper HID kit for a halogen housing (I should’ve stayed that). But there are proper LED bulbs for halogen and projector housings! The difference is the way the LEDs are positioned on the bulb housing.
There are no legal LED kits for halogen headlights.
aapexshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/NHTSA-Regulations-HID-LED-Kits.pdfDoesn't matter if the seller claims it's "street legal" or whatever. What are they going to say, that it's illegal? Plus, "street legal" isn't a term found in the federal law books. It's actually just a made up term to make you feel good about your purchase. No different from the guy on the corner selling some pills and telling you it's "DEA legal." The only difference is that the DEA takes its mission seriously, while the NHTSA seems to be a little uninterested, likely due to a lack of funding and the fact that headlight bulbs aren't as sexy of an issue as DRUGS.
ShinerBock wrote:
I don't think some of here know how a halogen housing works. The reason why it is scattered the way it is in a halogen housing is due to the low light output of a halogen bulb therefore it is able to reflect upward without blinding people. If you put a brighter bulb ,such as an HID or LED bulb, then the reflector in the housing that are pointing upward will cause the light to scatter upward blinding oncoming drivers. It has nothing to do with the beam pattern of the bulb because it is the beam pattern of the reflectors in the halogen housing that cause this issue. Hence the reason why it is illegal to put a brighter bulb such as an HID or LED bulb in a halogen housing.
This is completely off-base.
The reflector and light source work together intimately. A 1 millimeter offset in, say, the position of the filament relative to the reflector can result in a headlamp range loss of 100 feet. This same 1 millimeter offset can result in excessive glare.
You don't put HID in a halogen headlamp because a filament looks totally different than a HID arc. For one, headlamp bulb filaments are straight. HID bulbs have arcs. An arc is not a straight line. And this relates to what I said about a mere 1 millimeter difference making a 100 feet difference.
You don't put LED in a halogen headlamp…yet…because the chips on a LED bulb don't match the characteristics of a filament. The issue with LED chips is they don't emit light very well off-axis, and they require a lot of cooling to match a halogen bulb’s output and sustain it. Fortunately, these are all solvable problems, and one day we'll have legal LEDs to put in halogen lamps.
