You might want to pull your headlights out and direct a water spray up inside the fender well to see where water is coming into the headlight bucket strong enough to get into the lamp.  That sounds like a big PITA to clear condensation out of the lamp.  I've never gotten any condensation inside the Bosch lamps that have been in service since I wrote that G-tech article.  I do wash the truck at a self-serve carwash at least a few times a year, and spray pretty good up inside the fenders too.  The headlight buckets of the 460s are pretty well sealed to the fenders though, so I don't think any water from the wheel well makes it to the lamps.

I use some silicone grease on the surfaces of the rubber boot on the Bosch lamp where the boot seals to the back of the lamp and to the bulb.  That may be the difference keeping water out of my lamps.  But if I were you I'd spend a little time figuring out how to keep that water out of the headlight buckets rather than having to mess with the lamps after a car wash.

Good luck, and thanks again for the info!

-Dave G.

Danny, a couple of things:

First off, full disclosure, this is DS of DS Lighting writing. I have worked very hard for many years to build and maintain my reputation for giving straight facts on automotive lighting, whether or not those facts generate any sales or popularity for me. I'm not the world's only source for automotive lighting devices and bulbs—though I do have a lot of stuff that's nearly impossible to find elsewhere—and I don't need any particular sale to keep food in my fridge, which affords me the formidable luxury of my position: I get to use my knowledge, experience and affiliations to help improve the general body of knowledge on the topic, and thus to give people the greatest possible opportunity to maximize the safety performance of their vehicles' lighting systems...because I like doing it!

You have stated that you prefer your PIAA Xtremewhite Plus bulbs, which have a blue/purple tint to the glass, to the +50 items which had colourless clear glass. I certainly don't intend to argue that point with you, since personal preferences are subjective and personal, and as such they aren't necessarily based on facts or logic.

But, you should be aware that bulbs like the ones you say you prefer significantly reduce the actual, real, objective performance of your lamps. They emit less light than even standard ordinary colourless-glass bulbs, and less of what they do put out is usable light. They create more glare than even high-output colourless-glass bulbs. They have a shorter lifespan than colourless-glass bulbs. And, they are sold at a high premium price compared to colourless-glass bulbs. For all those reasons, they are neither an effective nor a cost-effective choice. Now, here is proof:

1. They emit less light and have a shorter lifespan

This is a simple matter of physics. There is no such thing as a colour filter that does not subtract some portion of the light passing through it. That's what filtration is! Light that is absorbed by the filter is not available to illuminate the road and obstacles on or near it. Here's manufacturer data, from internal engineering databases, for output and lifespan at 13.2v for H1 bulbs. The numbers here are a composite of values applicable to the products of the big three European makers (Osram-Sylvania, Philips-Narva, Tungsram-GE). Each manufacturer's product in each category is slightly different but not significantly so. I picked H1-type bulbs @ 13.2v for this comparison, and while the absolute numbers differ with different bulb types (9006, H4, H7, H3, etc.), the relative comparison patterns hold good for whatever bulb type you consider. Lifespan is given as Tc, the hour figure at which 63.2 percent of the bulbs have failed.

•H1 (regular normal):
1550 lumens, 650 hours

•H1 Long Life (often OE fitment in North America)
1460 lumens, 1200 hours

•H1 Plus+30 High Efficacy (Osram Super, Sylvania Xtravision, Narva Rangepower, Candlepower Bright Light, Tungsram High Output, Philips Premium, GE NightHawk):
1700 lumens, 350 hours

•H1 Plus+50 Ultra High Efficacy (Philips VisionPlus, Osram Silverstar, Narva Rangepower+50, Tungsram Megalicht, but not Sylvania Silverstar):
1750 lumens, 350 hours

•H1 blue-glass 'extra white' (Osram CoolBlue, Narva Rangepower Blue, Philips BlueVision, Tungsram Super Blue or EuroBlue, Sylvania Silverstar, also PIAA Superwhite, Xtremewhite, Platinumwhite, etc—they've been rebranding and rebranding and rebranding these bulbs for the last decade or so):
1380 lumens, 250 hours

Now, looking over these results, which one would you rather:

(a) Buy and drive with?
(b) Sell?

The answer to (a) depends on how well you want to see versus how often to change the bulb. If you want the best possible seeing, you pick the Plus+50. If you don't care as long as it works and you don't want to hassle with it, you pick the long life.

The answer to (b) is determined by how rich your company's shareholders want you to be, and is obvious: You want to sell the bulb with the shortest lifespan, highest promotability and highest price. That'd be the blue-glass 'extra white' type, because that's how marketing works: it's easier to upsell and make claims based on something you can see when you pick up the product at the store and ogle it (e.g., different glass colour) than it is to do so based on something that you can't (think about it: "Buy these +50 bulbs, which when you hold them in the hand look identical to a plain old ordinary bulb"...not a very sexy marketing appeal, is it?)

More support for this assertion comes from the light-tunnel tests AutoExpress carried out several years ago, preserved here (for H7 bulbs) and here here and here (for H4 bulbs). Pay attention to the "beam" ratings, which are the luxmeter readings at the point of peak intensity. Sure, the blue bulbs aren't always at the very bottom of the heap, but it's clear by comparing the beam ratings that the highest-performing bulbs all have colourless clear glass. It stands to reason, and here is why:

The light-stealing effect of the blue glass is compensated by higher-wattage filaments. Remember, though, the degree to which such compensation works is limited by the legal regulations on bulbs. For every bulb type, there's a maximum allowable power consumption as well as a minimum and maximum allowable light output. So, the filament wattage can be increased to produce extra light (which is then stolen by the blue glass), but it's practically impossible to meet or exceed the output of an colorless-glass bulb because either you run up against the legal max wattage, or you reduce the lifespan to grossly unaceptable, short values. So, virtually all of these blue bulbs produce less light than their untinted counterparts, because the allowable range of light output is typically 30% while the allowable max wattage is frequently as tight as 7%. You can see the whole list of approved bulb types and their allowable output and wattage specs here (data from USC 49CFR564). Think about that for a moment: In the case of the "HB2" (H4) bulbs in your G-klasse, the allowable output is spec ±10%, which means a range of 20%. At 12.8v, the HB2 is permitted to emit between 728 and 1092 lumens. That's a pretty sizeable range, there—do you want to be driving around at night with the 730-lumen bulb, or with the 1090-lumen item, in your lamps? I know which ones I want. Note the wattage limitation for this bulb type is 72w on high beam, and 65w on low beam. That is a power rating at 12.8 volts, which is the US standard test voltage. The 12v ratings commonly used to refer to bulbs (e.g. "12v 55w" or in the case of H4, "12v 60/55w") are nominal ratings at 12.0 volts. Internationalized European ECE regulations contain these nominal 12v ratings as well as service ratings at 13.2v (for an H4: 1650/1000 lumens ± 15%, at 75/68w max). This can be confusing, but it's necessary to explain the different rating systems so that you can compare apples to apples.

Now, let's look at exactly what happens when we add blue/purple filtration to the bulb glass. Filament bulbs that have been filtered to produce "whiter" (actually bluer) light colour, AND which comply with DOT or ECE regulations, can be classified in two categories:

•The kind that produces about 12 to 20 percent less light than an unfiltered bulb and has a somewhat shorter lifespan

•The kind that produces almost the same amount of light as an unfiltered bulb and has an extremely short lifespan.

There are no "extra white" filtered bulbs that produce identical lumens to an unfiltered bulb and have the same lifespan, and there are certainly
none that produce _more_ lumens than an unfiltered bulb. There's no free lunch.

Glowing filaments produce a whole lot of light in the red-orange-yellow-green wavelengths, and only very little light in the blue-violet wavelengths. To put rough illustrative numbers on the matter, suppose that the low beam filament of an H4 bulb operating at 13.2v produces 1000 lumens (that happens to be the ECE spec), of which 250 are red, 250 are orange, 250 are yellow, 175 are green, 50 are blue and 25 are violet.

Now, suppose you want to add a filter to the glass that makes the light look bluer so that your marketing department can claim "HID look", "whiter light", "closer to natural daylight", "higher colour temperature" and the like. How does it do that? Well, there's no such thing as a filter that adds light into the beam passing through it—filters can only suppress light, not add it. So if we can't add green-blue-violet light, then the only way to get the light to look colder is to suppress green-blue-violet's opposites, which are red-orange-yellow. If we want the light to look, let's say, 20% bluer, we suppress red-orange-yellow by 20%. Looking up above, we see that we've got a total of 750 lumens' worth of red, orange and yellow. So, cutting this by 20% leaves 600 lumens, plus essentially all of the bulb's original green-blue-violet output of 250 lumens, so we've now got a bulb that produces light that looks 20% bluer and produces 850 lumens.

That 850 lumens happens to be the minimum legal output for an H4 low beam at 13.2v. One lumen less, and it's illegal. Unless you're a completely stinky Chinese company that really doesn't give a rat's patoot about it, you can't produce a bulb that produces only the bare minimum of light, because the nature of mass production is such that 50% of production will be 849 lumens or less. So, you have to put in a high-luminance filament to try to counteract some of the filtering losses. BUT we still have to come in under the max-allowable-wattage spec in DOT or ECE regulations.

So, let's say we build our H4 with a super-duper filament that produces 1200 lumens. That's too much for an H4, but we're going to take away some of those lumens with our blue glass. This 1200-lumen filament produces, let's say, 300 lumens red, 300 lumens orange, 300 lumens yellow, 210 lumens green, 60 lumens blue and 30 lumens violet. Now we put that same blue glass over it, which suppresses red-orange-yellow by 20%. Now we've got 720 lumens' worth of red-orange-yellow after filtration, plus 300 lumens' worth of green-blue-violet. That gives us a 910-lumen bulb, which is enough above the 850-lumen legal "floor" that we can run the bulb and even if some filaments only produce 1150 lumens instead of 1200, we're still legally OK. Of course, we still only have 910 lumens instead of the nominal 1000 or max-allowable 1150, and our 1200-lumen filament is going to have a significantly shorter life than a 1000-lumen filament, but we've got our bluer ("whiter") light appearance in a legal bulb. Thing is, this bluer ("whiter") light does not do anything to help us see better. All it does is alter the operating appearance of the lamp. Some people consider the resultant appearance more attractive than that of a lamp operating with a bulb using untinted glass, but the reality is that you are trading away real, actual seeing performance for a marketeer's notion of what looks cool.

2. They produce more glare

For any given intensity, the higher the relative blue content of the lamp's spectral power distribution, the greater the discomfort glare, WITHOUT any significant corresponding increase in seeing performance. This is the well-documented finding of two of North America's foremost researchers in human factors related to seeing and conspicuity in traffic, messrs. Sullivan and Flannagan of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (the study is Sullivan, J M, and Flannagan, M J: Visual Effects of Blue-Tinted Tungsten-Halogen Headlamp Bulbs. Michigan University, Ann Arbor, Transportation Research Institute, UMTRI #94291, April 2001). This is the heart of the illusion that these bulbs are brighter/better: you install them, stand in front of your vehicle, turn them on and get a visual impression of brighter lamps. "Wow, these are definitely brighter!" Well...no. They appear brighter to anyone looking at the headlamp, i.e., those in front of you in traffic, because of the suppression of yellow-orange-red light giving rise to relatively higher blue-violet content in the SPD. But that same suppression of yellow-orange-red definitely means poorer seeing, per the explanation above. This is why the many marketers of blue bulbs spend so much effort distracting you with jabber about the appearance of the headlamps and don't mention lumens or seeing performance at all. (It should be mentioned, there is one study that claimed to find an amazing, giant 50% improvement in drivers' ability to see when using a particular manufacturer's blue-tinted 'extra white' bulbs. That manufacturer funded the study and provided both the blue-tinted and standard-comparison bulbs for the project. You may draw your own conclusions.) The human visual system is very easily "fooled"; it is extremely easy to create conditions under which we feel we can see significantly better or worse than we actually can. When you are driving around by the light of bulbs you think let you see better, but which in fact reduce your objective seeing performance, you are markedly less safe.

You mention that you installed the PIAA blue-glass bulbs in your fog lamps, too. That was a counterproductive thing to do, perhaps even more so than when you put them in your headlamps. Not only do all the factors discussed above apply equally to fog lamps as to headlamps, but there is an additional factor at work when we consider bad-weather seeing, in which reduced-yellow/increased-blue is exactly the wrong way to go for optimum seeing in rain, fog and snow. It used to be popular to claim that yellow fog lamps are better because the yellow light "scatters less" in fog, snow and rain. That's wrong, there is no Rayleigh Scattering of vehicle lamp light in roadway fog. Rayleigh Scattering (the effect that makes the sky blue) occurs only when the water droplets are smaller than the light wavelengths, and such is not the case (not by several orders of magnitude) in roadway fog. The advantage of yellow light in rain/fog/snow has to do with the human visual system, which has a very tough time processing blue light. You may easily demonstrate this to yourself by looking at a dark blue storefront sign, a blue airport runway light, a string of blue Christmas lights, etc. from a distance of greater than about 15 feet: you will find the edges of such a blue light considerably blurrier and less distinct than the edges of a light source of any other colour. Blue wavelengths tend to focus ahead of the retina, rather than on it; it is a testament to the adaptibility of the human visual system that we're able to see blue edges as well as we can! This phenomenon can be taken to whatever yellow-extent you wish (the Germans wish for the extent to end at neutral white; the French historically wanted a much greater extent—they mandated selective-yellow light from all vehicle headlamps for sixty years), but the fact is that a SPD with suppressed yellow and relatively increased blue is opposite to what is needed for optimum seeing in poor weather. Back to the research; this one you can download for free.

Finally, some thoughts about the lighting equipment on your specific G-klasse: You made an error. Those Bosch lamps you specifically mention as having "no shield over the bulb" are not designed or intended for automotive (car/truck) usage. They're the 0 301 600 114 motorcycle headlamp. The optics are different, to produce a wider but significantly shorter-reaching beam than the car/truck 7" round lamp (which is Bosch 0 301 600 107). There are some 7" round headlamps that control upward stray light very effectively without bulb shields, but the decisions Bosch made with regard to reflector focal length and lens geometry mean that the lack of a bulb shield, in this particular lamp design, creates extremely high levels of upward stray light coming off the bulb's low-beam filament and scattering via the lens because it has not been directed by the reflector. Not really an issue in dry weather, but in rain, fog or snow, the upward wash light significantly degrades your ability to see forward. You can see this upward light easily by parking underneath a ceiling (garage, tunnel, etc.), turning on the low beams and looking upward! The bulb shield is omitted from the motorcycle version of the lamp for several reasons: The motorcycle headlamp performance requirements are considerably laxer in both the US and the international ECE regulations with regards to seeing distance and upward stray light. And, Bosch's bulb shield design is not at all vibrationproof; it is held to the reflector by the spring tension of its two support legs, and while this is generally adequate even for fairly rough car/truck service, the higher amplitudes of the vibration found in motorcycle service very quickly cause such bulb shields to detach from the reflector. They then rattle around within the headlamp, scratching up the reflective material and spoiling the headlamp.

In addition, the motorcycle headlamps you installed have a very much cheaper and less effective bulb holder and seal boot design. The car/truck headlamp has a separate heat-compensating bulb seat, while the bulb seat in the motorcycle headlamp is simply carved out of the steel reflector. Beam focus is much better and more consistent with the heat-compensating seat, but again, the motorcycle beam regulations are considerably less exacting than the car/truck requirements. And the car/truck seal boot has a labyrinthine vent/drain, while the motorcycle boot is simply a plain rubber cup. Yeah, you're going to get condensation that's tough to control with those lamps! You are correct that the original Hella optics are a particularly weak design, but the lamps you chose to replace them were not a wise or well-advised selection.

You're also correct that higher-wattage bulbs must be approached with extreme caution, but some of your information there is confused as well. There is no reason why overwattage bulbs would be problem free simply because your vehicle is "Euro spec". When increasing bulb wattage, the headlamp circuit must be upgraded to handle the extra current draw. Failure to do so will only cause catastrophic damage (fire) in extreme cases (e.g. 130w bulbs on a circuit designed for 45w bulbs, or 100w bulbs in thermoplastic headlamp reflectors), but even without a catastrophe, voltage drop increases with increasing current, and small voltage drops make large reductions in light output. Remember, light output is exponential to the power 3.4 with varying voltage! A 1v drop across the headlamp circuit sounds trivial until you realise that going from 13.2v to 12.2v drops the output of an H4 low beam from 1000 lumens to 765 lumens. So, that's the electrical reality. The heat reality is what has kept owners of newer G-klassen with the ZKW clear-lens headlamps from increasing bulb power. However, there have been some new bulbs introduced by Osram of Germany that offer some slick solutions to both problems, one of which is their 70/65w high efficacy bulb. This bulb produces 2000/1350 lumens at 13.2v with maximum actual wattage of 75/68, which is the ECE upper limit and therefore within what stock headlamp circuits are designed to handle. Of course, the lumens are higher than spec, so these bulbs are not DOT-legal, but guess what? Neither are your H4 headlamp units to begin with! The 70/65w Osram H4 bulb gives considerably better headlamp performance than any of the 60/55w +50 bulbs, and vastly better actual performance than any blue-glass 'extra-white' bulb...regardless of name brand, selling price, or package attractiveness.

Bet you've got the car/truck lamps and not to the motorcycle units! The easiest way to clear condensation out of headlamps is to prevent it getting in there in the first place, and to allow it an effective escape route once the inevitable small amount of moisture enters.

Poor idea. Silicone grease offgases when it gets hot, and the silicone condenses out on the reflector and the inside surface of the lens. This increases diffusion of the light beam, reducing its intensity and focus.

Hmmm... Thanks for the tip DS.

Is there anything I can do about potential deposits condensed internally that wouldn't be potentially worse for the lamp than letting sleeping dogs lie?

The actual grease on the boot is probably mostly gone now as a result of the boot bing on and off with bulb changes, but I could have a look and wipe away whatever's left.  Like I mentioned earlier, I don't think it's a significant contributer to my lack of condensation, I think that's mostly due to the design of the headlight buckets on the 460.

-Dave G.

I agree with you that most of your lack of a fishbowl problem is due to effective splash shielding on your headlamp bucket. H4 headlamps are not sealed beams, they aren't supposed to be sealed, and most efforts to seal them end in frustration. So, keeping the lamps protected from splash is the best idea.

 We are developing a new family of lamps that will put every existing H4 unit to shame, using a newer bulb design than the archaic H4 but preserving the E-code type beam distributions. Presently our 5.75" round prototype produces a beam vastly wider, longer-reaching and more intense than even the best-ever large 7" round H4. The design of this lamp family will be such that water sealing will be a great deal easier and more effective. Sorry I can't get more specific than that right now...watch this space!

Glad to help out! 

They and their equally-new 85/80w linemates from Osram are indeed better than the older types of high-wattage bulb, and here is why:

As wattage increases, the size of the filament necessarily increases, both in length and in diameter. This has a strongly negative effect on beam focus—the more closely the filament approximates a point source of light, the better the beam focus, and the greater the size of the filament, the poorer the beam focus. We see this measurably and significantly even when comparing a standard 60/55w bulb to a long-life 60/55w bulb (which has larger filament coils). Effective seeing distance drops significantly. At the same time, foreground light goes to nuclear levels, which does two things at the same time:

1) It fools you into thinking you've got "excellent" lighting. We humans are very poor subjective judges of our visual performance; it's very easy
to create situations in which we think/feel we can see much better (or much worse) than we actually can. I went into detail on this above.

2) It absolutely kills your distance vision. The brightly-lit foreground causes your pupils to constrict, with the result that you can meaningfully see all the irrelevant stuff going on within 50 feet of the car, and beyond that, you're effectively blind.

Obviously I am describing the extreme extent of the effect; I do not mean to suggest that you cannot see properly with your 100/90w bulbs! But the effect is real.

For most general illumination purposes, plain white light (unfiltered) is best. Keep in mind, a properly-fed tungsten-halogen lamp has a colour rendering index (CRI) of between 99 and 100. 100 is perfect. In clear weather, CRI is the one and only color-related parameter that is linked with seeing performance—the "color temperature" and "kelvin ratings" blue-lamp marketeers like to babble about are irrelevant.

Guess that is a year or two too early to have the newer "window-clear" ZKW units, but unless I am totally out to lunch (Dutch?), you can retrofit the newer lamps easily. Part number is A 463 820 00 59. Adjustor bushing is 463 820 10 46. Same parts, left and right, so you need two of each. They are surprisingly affordable and their performance is preferable to the flat-lens units you can currently buy to fit the buckets presently installed. I would, as I say, run Osram's 70/65w H4 bulbs, aim the lamps carefully per the aim page, drive and be happy. If you want to spend more money and do more work, you can install the headlamp levelling system. Pics of the new-type lamps and P/Ns for the adjustor system are here. There's other stuff you can do (better bulbs for the brake and turn signal lamps, etc.), send an e-mail if you wish.

Yeah, I do not think highly of the Hella 7" round optic, no matter what bracket is attached to it. Isocandela scan comparison is here; the first and second units mapped are NLA, which is a pity. The 3rd is a Cibie, and the 4th is your Hella. Pfft.

You're not going to like this: a cutoff is an important part of a well-designed low beam pattern (necessary; not sufficient), but it has to be done right or it works against you instead of for you. Two types of low-beam cutoff shape are allowed in the US: VOL and VOR.

VOL: a type of US-spec low beam with a horizontal cutoff at the top of the Left side of the beam, 0.4° below the centerline height of the lamps (= 2.1" below centreline height at 25' distance). This type of cutoff is conceptually similar to the European/rest-of-world cutoff, and lamps such as the ZKW European- and US-approved W463 lamp use this type of cutoff.

VOR: a type of US-spec low beam favoured by American and Japanese automakers at the moment, with a horizontal cutoff at the top of the Right side of the beam, at the centerline height of the lamps.

Lens markings will tell you whether your lamps are VOL or VOR. The VOL type, if the beam is well designed, can give longer in-lane seeing distance than the VOR type, which tends to give short seeing distances because the light cannot go above horizontal even on the right side of the beam away from oncoming traffic. This is why it's so disconcerting to drive the Subaru after dark For various reasons, most of them specious and dumb, many US-market cars come with VOR low beams.

The cutoff itself can be a little disconcerting if you're used to poorly-focused older-type US beams. There is a tendency to feel as if you can't see as far due to the sharp cutoff. Here's the thing: Seeing distance isn't materially different for the two types of low beam, it just seems so because that cutoff on the road surface gives you a real-time, dynamic visual indication of your seeing range. "Here's where your light beam ends. If you can't stop in time, slow down!" That information isn't available without a cutoff, which is why North Americans tend to overdrive their low beams to a greater degree than drivers in the rest of the world where low beams with offside cutoffs are universal. The upset stomach you're experiencing is because you've got a conflict going on: You're used to driving a certain road at a certain speed, but you've got this new visual indication of your seeing range that's unconsciously telling you to slow down.

If despite all this you are a hardline "no cutoff!" kind of guy starting with standard-fitment 7" round headlamp buckets, then do a web search for "H6024NH", which is the P/N for General Electric's NightHawk 7" round sealed beam. This is the only current-production 7" sealed beam that doesn't totally eat it, and as US DOT beam patterns go, is fairly decent. You'll probably find it available from Ft Garry Fire Equipment.

You wouldn't've seen it without the cutoff, either!

Overdue for change-out, then; by the time the degradation is visible to the naked eye, the headlamp is long past dead.

Yes, definitely. Do it this way for maximum reliability and minimum voltage drop. But you still have to have good headlamps! 

Despite your happiness with the results, what you have done is in fact grossly unsafe, both for yourself and for everyone else who shares the same roads you drive at the same time you're on them with your headlamps turned on.

Read this, and read Hella's own warning against HID "retrofits". Halogen headlamps (any/all of them) do not have optics that properly distribute the light from an HID burner, no matter how carefully one tries to place the arc exactly where the filament went, and the moving-burner "BiXenon" kits—all of which are very poorly made, mostly in China, and conform to no technical standards whatsoever—are even a sicker joke in terms of safety performance than the already-lousy non-moving units. It's like wearing somebody else's spectacles: You may be able to make them fit your face and look good, but you won't see properly, because the optics are all wrong. (The difference, of course, is that putting on the wrong eyeglasses isn't illegal, while putting Xenon burners in a halogen headlamp is, and for good reason.)

Want to see what typically happens to the beam pattern of an H4 headlamp when you install a Xenon burner in place of the H4 bulb? Take a look. This is a laboratory test of a 7-inch H4 headlamp very similar to the Hella unit you started with, first with an H4 bulb, and then with an "H4 HID kit" similar to the one you purchased. Look at all that glare/dazzle light and the grossly overlit foreground! Distance vision is very poor and glare is extremely high with this kind of "retrofit", even if the beam you see when shining the lamps on a wall isn't quite as misshapen as this one. (I note you show us a photograph that nicely illustrates the extreme glare coming from your hacked headlamps...but you don't show us any beam pattern pictures. H'mmmmm...)

The only safe, effective, legitimate and (lastly) legal way to retrofit HID headlamps on a vehicle not originally so equipped is to install the complete optical system, specifically engineered to distribute the light from the HID bulb properly. See the G-klasse optics here. Of course it's more expensive than a pathetic Chinese "HID kit", that's because HID kits are by definition unsafe garbage from a part of the world where there are no auto lighting safety regulations to speak of.

Please, for your own safety as well as everyone else's, do not continue to drive at night with your hacked headlamps. It is NOT safe.

yes, correct. Go for the new G320CDI Headlamps with Sensors on front and rear axle and a control unit.

mfg

Klaus