Oh for sure I'm not.

What you are missing is that you have to choose a bulb that matches the planar location of the filament, and the best way to do that is not buy ebay bulbs, and they will cost 5 or more times the price buying them off the bay.

Having said that - the supposition of an issue is vastly overstated as there is some tollerance in parabola design, as least those that I had some design activity involvement, such that the new LEDs work just fine, and produce less glare, a win win compared to halogens.

 

This is obviously his realm of research drop it everyone.

 

In all seriousness, I have tried everything on this car including the Radioflier non popup, frogeye, hids in stock housing (I know I know but oh well), and I have the German Velumen Lowrise popups similar to the low cost 4 eyes kit, but it wasn't around yet. My low beams are on the inside unfortunately, but if I had to do it again I would go 4eyes, because they are enclosed projectors from hella, you can put hid's in them, and they keep the pop ups.

 

guys - Great info here! Is there a more moderately priced system similar to the Radioflyer one? I like that look, not looking for low profile, and either LED or HID would be fine.

Thanks in advance!
Ed

 

thank you. That’s what I was trying to communicate but that’s Too much work on an iPad. 😂

 

Ed
There are a number of options on ebay, the issues are lack of data to predict performance and potentially quality.

I have modded LEDs into lamp housing with great sucess, thus statements like they don't work are flat out wrong.

They all work where work equals they function, how well depends upon the engineering that went into the bulb, the projector or lens, depending upon which system it is.

The worst was the original C5 design where all the light distribution comes off the outer lens.

Much better was to tune the parabola to take a broad range of bulbs and kick that light out down the road through a clear lens.

It is here that filament design "can" impact performance. However -- given the generic anemic 'cheap LED' market offerings there are very few sharp eyes that are going to notice the difference because there are too many other variables that impact actual illumination down the road.

The other issue you will find is that the articles like "Best LEDs..." are nothing more than a means to promote what they sell at 3-5 times the price. Even if they say they test, they don't test significantly different bulbs and most recent entries are not much better than a standard halogen.

Another detail you will find is that the performance data is missing or faked. It will take you a good deal of time to look at bulbs, ask for the data, and determine good from bad.
Then you have choices of pop up or fixed. Projectors, styling, paintable shields, and more options.

There is a hard to find popup that put two projectors into the same package space as the Original design, those are very appealing, however like the others - data of actual lumen output is hard to get.

And... the other thing that you need to look for is DOT on the lens, this is key as they did test the light to certify it for use on USA roads. Lacking the DOT cert, means they basically are not street legal.
I have challenged that where lacking and magically the product disapears off the market in only a few hours - meaning they do know they should have had the DOT cert.

In summary this C5 is probaly one of the toughest to sort out due to the variables, there is no single answer other than the super expensive options are no better than a $300 kit.