Illegal? Bad news?
Since the 'H4' kits are made up of bits.. HID wasn't designed to use a Hallogen headlamp lense but a specially designed projector, so the beam is awful.
Pleanty of people say how much better they think it is and how much safter they feel but 99% of the time your lighting up the floor infront of you and lots of drivers due to the bad beam pattern.
The end result is actually a poorer view / false sense of security as long-range visibility is reduced.
Plus you dazzle other drivers who might crash / crash into you.
Hong Kong is really bad with this problem lately so the police are clamping down on illegally fitted kits.
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech ... sions.html
Have a read of that for a 'techie' explanation of why the kits are bad.
The most dangerous part of the attempt to "retrofit" Xenon headlamps is that sometimes you get a deceptive and illusory "improvement" in the performance of the headlamp. The performance of the headlamp is perceived to be "better" because of the much higher level of foreground lighting (on the road immediately in front of the car). However, the beam patterns produced by this kind of "conversion" virtually always give less distance light, and often an alarming lack of light where there's meant to be a relative maximum in light intensity. The result is the illusion that you can see better than you actually can, and that's not safe.
It's tricky to judge headlamp beam performance without a lot of knowledge, a lot of training and a lot of special equipment, because subjective perceptions are very misleading. Having a lot of strong light in the foreground, that is on the road close to the car and out to the sides, is very comforting and reliably produces a strong impression of "good headlights". The problem is that not only is foreground lighting of decidedly secondary importance when travelling much above 30 mph, but having a very strong pool of light close to the car causes your pupils to close down, worsening your distance vision...all the while giving you this false sense of security. This is to say nothing of the massive amounts of glare to other road users and backdazzle to you, the driver, that results from these "retrofits".
Don't do it
I've never seen a decent Halogen converision kit, and after you read the above article you'll probably find out why, i've had people show me that their new kit is 'awesome' only to realise after understanding how headlights work that it's actually shite. :-)
Get some good H4's in there like
Philips Extreme
)
