Most cars today ship with good ‘ole DOT-approved headlights, complete with low and high beams, and even have fog lights as standard or optional equipment. They are, to be blunt, useless. I’ve never found them to put out enough light, and the light is too dispersed to be useful. And fog? Fuggetaboutit. That’s why I always replace my fog lights with a set of aftermarket driving lights. What happens, though, if you have HID headlamps, you ask? Why, you can get HID driving lights, too.

Fog lights tend to be set up to illuminate for shorter distances and a wider area. Driving lights, on the other hand, are more for distance – sort of like high beams mounted down low. PIAA’s HID driving lights give you the benefit of a lighting engineer designed lamp and reflector housing with HID bulbs and ballasts.

Granted, with a Street Price of $900 they will set you back a bit. But you’ll never overdrive your lights again. Just be careful to align them properly so you’re not blinding other drivers – or better yet, turn them off when you see oncoming traffic, just like you do when you swith to low beams out of kindness.

And with these, you’ll end up with a nice consistent look to your lighting up front. The product page includes dimensions for the lamps, so you can see how they would fit in your stock bumper openings. If the 600 series doesn’t fit, they offer a few other shapes and sizes that might work for you. In my old VW Golf, there were no bumper openings for lights, so I installed a set similar to their 2100 series driving lamps in the lower grill opening.

Note that there are also vehicle-specific kits for this model and their other HID models; check and see if your car is on the list. If they don’t have the full kit, they’ll often have a custom mounting kit you can purchase separately. Whatever you do though, make sure you’re buying “driving lights” and not “fog lights.”

600 HID Driving Lamp [PIAA]
2100 HID Driving Lamp [PIAA]
Vehicle-Specific Kits and Custom Mounting Kits [PIAA]
Street Prices [Google Products]

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under PIAA, Lighting, Safety, Electrical, Appearance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.