Road Legal Headlight Upgrades

[MR Will]

I am doing quite a lot of nighttime driving and I am realising that the land cruiser headlights are particularly terrible. I have already swapped the bulbs out for Osram Night Breaker 220 bulbs but it is still not great. Has anyone else found a good solution to it? I was unwilling to just put in led's and wanted to make sure everything was still road-legal for the UK. Has anyone found any good solutions?

 

[OM617YOTA]

Is the headlight lens clear? Should be glass and not yellow like plastic headlights. Is the reflector clean and not hazy? If any of these are the case, replace the headlights.

Unless the Night Breaker is different in the UK than what I'm seeing online, pull out those Night Breaker bulbs and toss them. Blue = bad. Less lumens on the road, most scattered by atmosphere, and particularly badly suited to the human eye. Talk to Daniel Stern and get some proper bulbs in there.

Next, make sure they're properly aimed.

If that doesn't suit your needs, swap to round headlights, then you'll have endless options of every quality level. If you have to do replace the headlights due to step one, I'd skip straight to this step.

Beware that most products in the lighting marking are utter and complete dangerous garbage. Koito halogen headlights appropriate to your side of the road driving are the gold standard, there are also good options from Hella and used to be Cibie. Then LED options of all flavors, most of them bad. If you go LED, make sure you're using JW Speaker, Hella, Grote, Truck Lite, Philips, etc. solid name brand. If you're getting them for 30 dollars/pounds on Amazon, they'll be garbage.