If you’re looking for a lighting upgrade to your vehicle I don’t recommend you bother looking (yet). Most search engines will waste your time offering you a thousand dealers offering to sell you an awesome deal on not for road use lighting kit. You’ll be mislead and waste either lots of time or money that will effectively render your vehicle illegal.

I’ve been looking for alternatives to the stock lighting on my DR-Z for a while now and seem to have been entering spirals of misinformed texts that encourage you to break the law with “a brighter car/bike is a safer car/bike” mentality, and that the self righteous rant of by being able to see (as the driver) better you’ll be safer.

The problem is that H.I.D. kits are retro-fitting kits to use your existing reflector and lens of you headlight. The problem arises due to the fact that the reflector and lens were specifically designed for a halogen bulb of a set wattage. The ribs in the lens allow the light to be distributed evenly and clearly across the road in such way that it doesn’t offend the oncoming traffic.  However, when you remove the halogen bulb which is of a set size and brightness with a specific fitting to sit in an exact position inside the reflector and replace it with a different size bulb of a much greater brightness it’s position inside the reflector is going to be different, the light distribution through the lens will come out not as it was intended, since the bulb position isn’t in the right place/distance from the lens and the light distribution will be shoddy and out of focus, and more often than not, distributing light higher (which offends people facing it).

However, reading up Department for Transportation it does say that unless e-marked:

The headlamp unit (outer lens, reflector, bulb) shall be type approved to ECE 98 and be “e-marked” to demonstrate this. That can only be done by the headlamp supplier – Hella, Valeo etc. who must test the headlamp in an independent laboratory.

Since e-marked H.I.D. kits (that include the lens and reflector) aren’t yet readily available (unless purchased from the manufacturer of your vehicle), anything you fit to your vehicle is effectively illegal, and not only that… it is also inconsiderate and dangerous to other road users. Being blinded by an offensive light from an on-coming car can temporarily impair your vision, dazzling  and making the road ahead harder to focus upon.

Be considerate, be legal.