Hella LED Headlight Upgrade

[skooter]

Has anyone tried these out? Seems like a pretty simple swap.

https://www.bimmerworld.com/Lighting/He ... 0-E28.html

Also, are there any good kits out there for swapping the other bulbs to LED?

Thanks

[Mike W.]

Interesting. Hella of course has a good reputation, which might make for optimism about beam pattern, albeit at a heart attack price, color is on the blue side and while not quite a vintage BMW look, at least in the pics they don't look as bad as some of the LED retrofits. Keep us posted if you do decide to go for them.

[Galahad]

I actually did something similar over the summer, here's what my car looks like now:



I like how it looks, although I understand it's not for everybody.

Notes:
I used bulbs from Morimoto, not Hella; I wanted to avoid reflector housings since the beam cutoff isn't as good.
Absolutely DO NOT do this if you have euro headlights - I had to get very creative with a dremel, bad bulb housings and a lot of epoxy to make this work. The sealed beam replacements will be a direct fit for US headlight cars IF the back side of the LED bulb isn't too large. The US buckets can be trimmed back to fit some bulbs, but very thick ones will interfere with the mounting plate.
I had to rewire the headlights so all 4 low and high beams worked. The 7" bulbs I used are built to pull current only from the high beam power line when the highs are on, which tripped the low beam check light until I rewired them. That might just be the specific model bulbs I bought but it's worth mentioning.
This was a massive improvement in headlight performance - definitely worth the (wallet destroying) money if you do much night driving.

[Foonfer]

Has anyone tried these out? Seems like a pretty simple swap.

https://www.bimmerworld.com/Lighting/He ... 0-E28.html

Also, are there any good kits out there for swapping the other bulbs to LED?

Thanks

This is one of the closest approximations to a "stock look" that I have seen outside of the world of Sealed Beam/H1-H4 halogen conversions. Has anyone here tried it? Also, I'm a bit intrigued by the following message, prominently featured in RED on the store website:

Note: These lights are not DOT approved. Each headlight is SAE certified, but NOT approved for use on US public roads. For this reason this headlight kit is sold for off-road / racing use only.

So, either there's way more E28s and E30s on offroad/racing duty than I ever imagined, or no one in the USA has ever purchased one of these sets, or... this type of language is just COA boilerplate on the seller side but in all reality this kind of thing doesn't really get enforced.

(*spoken in "ok boomer" voice*: I'll believe it gets enforced the moment I stop seeing these LED "light bars" under front bumpers or over roofs, in what has become a nightly display of fragile masculinity and overcompensation)
If someone could, ahem, shed some light on the issue... it would be helpful

[Mike W.]

It's just boilerplate. Yes, technically they're illegal just as H1/H4 have forever been for E28s, let alone euro lights. I started running H1/H4 on my Bavaria back in '82 and so far as I could tell never even got a second glance, let alone a ticket for them. With the dizzying amounts of different OE lights now it would be a rare cop who would even have a clue as to what's legal and what's not and the thought of enforcing that technicality is lottery winning remote in terms of the odds. Unless they had it in for you and just started writing stuff up, which they've been known to do in which case them being legal is irrelevant.

[Foonfer]

Thanks Mike for your insight, makes sense. Also helps to avoid drawing attention from the offroad E28/E30 mafia... LOL