But on a rainy day or with oncoming traffic on a single lane road, these lights just scatter and fade away. They look brilliant when you look at them head-on or when they lit up a dark alley. My experience with HID has been with Baleno (extensively, I have driven other cars with LED/HIDs but for short duration only). I have always thought along the same lines. A picture from the article that summarizes the car light technology. And what about number of lights? The Duster adventure addition came with 8 bulbs upfront! (Including high/low beams)Īutocar had an article on same and link can be found here. While 55/60W is legal output for Halogens, Is there something similar for HID’s/LED’s? I know they need much lesser power to generate similar output as halogens, but the intensities vary across cars. So here goes my query, what is the best recipe to make those fantastic lights that look good and also serve the purpose?Īnother related query I have is w.r.to output. To me, it appears - just a good bulb is insufficient to provide good illumination but a car needs well designed headlamps, reflectors etc. I have stock halogens in my Innova 2008 model and always found them to be more than adequate –be it in highway/city. While the LED’s/HID’s are bright enough to blind the oncoming traffic, they don’t seem to serve the purpose of providing satisfactory illumination.

Despite the newer technologies one thing I hear is, 'The lights are inadequate'! Examples are a plenty- The Fortuner(Full LED), Octavia(LED?), Scross(HID) to name a few. What has changed dramatically is availability of these technology even in the price bracket of 6lacs (READ: Ignis).

Over past few years we have seen advent of newer technologies like HID’s, LED’s and Laser. For over 2-3 decades Halogens have been the main stream lighting technology that was offered in most of the cars.

Hid bulb vs halogen