My car's due MOT soon. The previous owner fitted aftermarket HID dips to standard 147 facelift halogen headlamp units. The car is late 2008, with no headlamp washers or wipers ever fitted.
Can anyone give me a view on whether this is MOT conformant or not, please? Searching the forum seems to throw up lots of info but not without ambiguity
I like the HID's in terms of being able to see where I'm going, and cut off seems pretty sharp and considerate. But if it's going to fail I'd rather fix the problem beforehand.
There was an article in Car mechanics Magazine a couple of months back about this and unless you fit the entire HID specific headlight assembly then you are breaking the law.
If you fit a HID bulb to a normal reflector it will still dazzle people even if you set the beams to the same pattern as the normal bulbs due to beam scatter (as the HID is brighter, Beam scatter is greater)
So, whilst the MOT man might pass it due to the bean being acceptable that doesn't mean they are legal.
You will invalidate your insurance as you are effectively making the car illegal to use on the road. Same as if you remove a DPF from a Diesel car.
I've had aftermarket HIDs fitted to various vehicles over the last 7 or so years and never had an issue with MOTs. The bottom line is if the examiner does fail them - it is easy to just replace the bulbs with the original halogens anyway, re-tests are free so why worry? Obviously the beams must be correctly aimed and not dazzle other road users, but that is true of any headlamp.
As long as you have a projector style headlamp then the pattern and scatter should be ok. If you are sticking the HIDs in a normal headlamp then you're asking for trouble. I've put aftermarket HIDs in all my projector style lamps with no issues. Scatter and pattern have been fine.
In the end I pulled the HID kit. I liked the dip but ordinary halogen mains were weak. I replaced both with H7 and H1 Philips Xtreme Vision, which make the balance better and improve on stock halogen quite noticeably. HID are better and brighter but even with the R type H7 are a bit uncontrolled. If I can afford a projector conversion some time I might go dual HID or LED. Dip bulb change access is a fiddle especially on the o/s. I'd read suggestions that the wheel arch liner or bumper had to come off. Easier way was to disconnect the skinny return hose to the header tank, undo its mounting bolts and push it in front of the block. Quite easy then. Anyhow it passed MOT. Interesting aside: a blanked and mapped EGR + deleted swirls gave a smoke test result just one-third of the limit.
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