seen78wagon said:
YEAH! THATS what I was looking into. I was looking into getting some REAL HID headlights for my '97 grand prix, then I saw these.......I drive the wagon more, and I love putting new age technology parts on old cars.
I've done a lot of research about the HID conversions. Here's some stuff I found out:
1) Almost none of them use the proper ballasts or ignitors that the claimed ("genuine
Osram... genuine
Phillips")manufacturer uses. They are generic parts made by that manufacturer for other purposes, not automotive lighting.
2) On a car with a single reflector with a dual filament bulb, you will lose your high beams. There are some units on the market that have an electromagnetic system that moves the bulb inside the reflector to "shift" the light as if you had a high/low beam setup.
3) HID bulbs have no filament. They have an electric arc. This creates a "curved" light source instead of a flat one. The optics on a stock style reflector are not designed to work with this pattern of light and the result is a lot of restrike. Restrike is when light is reflected off the surface of the reflector and hits the light source again. This is lost light energy and ends up creating much more heat instead of putting out light.
4) The reflectors on the conversions are designed for a filament bulb that has the filament running from left-to-right inside the reflector. All current HID bulbs are oriented so the arc runs from front-to-back. You may have
brighter lighting, but you're actually putting less light on the road.
There's a lot more to it, but those are the basics as they apply to G-bodies.
Tommy
