RunInColorado

For some funny reason I was looking at my headlights today and noticed something that I thought was rather odd. It appears that there is a small hole in the headlight reflector where a small bulb could be placed. I thought that this occurs only on the Euro lamps because of the "city lamps." Since I bought this car used I do not know if the headlights were switched from the original. Does anyone have similar holes on their US headlights? or by some stroke of great luck are these the Euro versions? I can try to provide pictures if that would help.

Many thanks

sph17

I noticed the same thing on my 97 W202. The effort of obtaining the holder for the peanut bulb (to allow the bulb to be placed in the hole) and wiring it to come on with the parking lights has kept me doing this upgrade.

BTW I have real European Headlights on my W123. The holder for the "city light" bulb is part of the main H-4 bulb holder, not separate like it appears on our cars.

Also, there was a change in the headlights in 1997. MY 95 & 96 in the US had a headlight that used an H-4 Bulb for the Lo/High and the "pightail" bulb for the fog light. MY 97 and after uses an H-7 bulb for the Lo beam, and a H-1 bulb for the fog light and a second H-1 bulb for the Hi beam.

RunInColorado

What kind of bulbs would I need? I spent time at radioshack and found bulbs that will fit and holders for them, but they say they would only last 30hrs! Im up to the challenge of making a holder for them to do this upgrade. Also, Im not sure if anyone can tell me or not, but I took the side marker lights off and noticed there were only 3 wires (pos, neg, grd). How does the bulb know when you are using a turn signal vs just the side marker lights? If I knew which wires to tie into, it would help a ton! Thanks!

sph17

This is a bulb holder and a "peanut bulb" for a "City Light" from a Hella European headlight assembly for a W123. It actually fits into the bulb hole in my 97 W202, but it dosn't lock in. I am sure if I fiddled with it or just silicone cemented it in, it would work, but it would be a kludge.

Our US headlight assemblys don't have a wire for powering the "city lights" so you need to run a wire in. In the W123 there was an unused position in the electical US spec plug from the wireing harness plug, and if you could get a female connector that fit in the plastic plug, you could run a wire into a European headlight assembly.

I haven't checked my W202 electical connector to see if there is an elegant way of runing a wire in. The down and dirty way would be to drill a hole in the backside of the headlight assembly, thread a wire through, and seal the hole with silicone cement. I don't know if I would do thigh though.

scorchie

The bulb holder that fits can also be found from a BMW side marker... you may want to search for this because it is pretty old stuff.

The euro headlights are definitely different, as they have vacuum leveling and the connector has extra pins for the city light.

-s-

RunInColorado

BMW side marker light sounds good, that gives me some place to start with. I had the girlfriend out helping me look at it this afternoon and I think it is possible, but im trying to do it the cleanest way possible so I can return to stock without much problems. Im also thinking about a HID conversion kit later this year. Those were great ideas guys so thanks alot! Now all I need to do is to decide a power source and figure out how to run the wires!

sph17

I used the front parking lightes as a power source for my "city lights" when I put European Headlights into my W123. I just used a 3M splitter to the energized wire going to my front corner parking lamps and took the wire into the connector as I mentioned above.

Scorchie: I did a search for mention of the BMW bulb holder you mentioned above that would fit in our MY 97-00 headlight assembly, and didn't find it in the first page of the search results. I was going to look around my E39 to see if there is a bulb holder that looks like it would work. Do you have any other information in reguards to this?

Thanks,

Steve

scorchie

I think you may want to search on the web rather than just here at mbworld... it's been some time since this was discovered! I think it would be a car of similar vintage to a W202, so maybe an E36 or E34 would be more appropriate... or even an E30?

-s-