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I've a pre-facelift car, with factory Xenon headlights. I like to keep the car as standard as possible, but feel the headlamps are letting it down. I've sanded/polished them, but feel the later light are a better option.
Has anyone upgraded their pre-facelift cars, to the more modern lights? What is the easiest option? Would like an OEM (facelift) look as possible.
You are in exactly the situation that the wife and I are in with two of our cars, namely "Dad's car" and her car, both of model year 2000. Both came with the factory HID (xenon) reflectors.
A terrific upgrade, I've found, is DEPO's new single-xenon (HID) headlight assembly. It is made specifically to work well in pre-facelift cars, and it does have the low-beam auto-leveler mechanism. It's the only aftermarket headlight assembly that I know of that has that. DEPO's goal was to replicate the factory post-facelift look, while being a bit of an upgrade, light-dispersion-wise, over the factory reflector HID's. They work with both halogen and factory-HID cars.
They also have the distinction of working very well with post-facelift W220's. My 2003 S430 has a set of them as well. This car originally came with halogens, so to work with factory-halogen cars, they have some correction circuitry which fools the SAM's into thinking that halogens are in the car. These work very well. Of course, any halogen car can be reprogrammed with STAR Diagnostic System for the "XENON = PRESENT" setting, which I eventually got around to doing (they still work just fine).
Having spent a fair amount of time on the other forum, I made a thread over there, with pics, showing what they look like. The appearance is exactly like post-facelift factory. Since my S600 TT still has its (refurbished) factory headlight assemblies, I was able to put the new assemblies and the factory ones head-to head.
Ah, gotcha. @Dave2302 is increasingly over here on MBWorld. He's also in the UK, and he was apparently able to either build or source some RHD Depos.
One option would be to get the LHD assemblies and then find some RHD bi-xenon E46-style projectors to swap in. As you can see from that rather long thread, that's basically what I did with two sets of Depos, just with LHD projectors since I'm in the States. Same process, though, and it's actually not difficult to do if you've got an oven.
09-03-2019 | 08:55 AM
