In my rural county they stop people for a burned out bulb, any one, even a marker light. $85 ticket. Judge knows the county needs money. I can just imagine what will happen when law enforcement gets some kind of "head light candle power tester" similar to the portable drug tests. I expect we'll soon have mass traffic stops for liscence, registration, insurance, and now head lamp overload check.

 

It's not really the candlepower. It's the fact that lenses designed for halogen bulbs are incompatible with HID bulbs. You can't get correct lighting.

 

Point taken. But once they make a tester for it, and law enfocement figures out they can make money on it....

Their favorite ploy near me on the less travelled I-16 - program the road work warning sign to say "insurance check 1 mile ahead" . About a mile up ahead is a decoy car with blue light on. About 1/4 mile ahead is an exit. At the top of the exit ramp are 12 police cars, hello.

 

True. For retrofitted HID's I hope it's sooner than later. They are, in fact, already wising up. See the last paragraph of the OP.

 

Just move to Denver where a huge number of people, including myself run HiD's with no issues.
The trick to running HID's is to make sure the bulbs you use have a 180 degree shield to control the difusion of the light.

 

Someone had fit HID lamps to my truck in thr past, but disconnected them and just left the ballasts in place. I guess they got caught.

 

Well looks like mine are illegal then, never actually realised :S

 

only time I stopped cars for hid is the fools that buy the off colored ones like blue or purple and if they were blinding me in the cruiser

driving with your hellas turned on can be illegal also

 

I retrofitted HID projectors into a halogen housing on my civic....It required opening the housing, installing and aiming the projector and running the wiring.
The whole process takes about 6 hours but,

Its the hi-lo projector with a solenoid activated shield...so when you wanna flash or go hi-beam the solenoid moves the shield out of the way...

So you get the best of both worlds, the high intensity discharge combined with not blinding incoming traffic.

I live in country north of Toronto and the HID's really help.

i bought the projectors here

The Retrofit Source online: headlight upgrades for all applications

I'm all for going after guys who stick an HID bulb in a halogen reflective housing...that is just rude and hazardous to oncoming traffic, but to use a "shotgun" approach to ticketing and ruling IMO is not right either.

If my retrofitted projector uses the exact same system as OEM projectors, why is it illegal if their is legal? Frankly, i wouldnt care either. I dont run blue HID's, i run them as close to white in the Kelvein (4300K) so they dont look like HIDs...the only time i blind people is going over a hill.

You bet your *** i'm going to be retrofitting my Disco 2 with the projectors if its feasible.

 

Lot's of people do, it's still illegal.
Not to mention the fact that, because of the way the human eye works, HID lights often give poorer lighting even though people perceive it as better.

It's very simple, because you installed HID bulbs in a housing/lens combination that wasn't designed for HID. The factory isn't doing that.