So, I am pretty impressed with the intensity of the Xenon headlights on my XKR. I am especially impressed with the high beams. I live on a street with few street lights and these lights illuminate and cast light very well.

The side illumination and tracking as turns are made are equally impressive. I too my neighbor for a ride and he noted that the headlights do a power up sweep that was very evident as we were nose to the garage door. Very cool.

One thing I did notice while driving home last night was that the low beams seemed to do a bit of jumping as I was driving. It did not seem to be responding to bumps in the road, just more electro-mechanical if that makes any sense. It was a cold night out and I'm wondering if the temperature had anything to do with it. Any thoughts here? I'll be inspecting a little more this evening and checking on the brake lamps as I received a brake lamp warning on the dash on my ride in this morning. Not sure if these are related, but hoping someone could shed some light on this (sorry, could not resist).

 

Oh, and while we are on the topic, I have a few fog and side light bulbs that are out. I plan to replace along with the brake light bulb if warranted. I am assuming these are traditional bulbs and was wondering if LED bulbs be used in their place?

 

On my '07 xkr the passenger side brake bulb was just not making contact with the contacts. I had to putz around a half a dozen times to get them to finally stay in contact with the bulb as the warning light kept going off after a couple days.

 

Sorry, didn't mean to thank you for asking a question. J5hort, it would be helpful if you put the vehicle make and model in your signature so we know which car you question pertains to.

As I understand it, anything pre 2010 is conventional (non LED) and you can buy or build a conversion. Just do a forum search for LED taillights and it will come up. SNG Barrett sells kits I think on eBay.

Sorry can't help you on the headlight issue.

 

Can you describe the 'jumping' a bit more? Side-to-side, or up-and-down?
The one thing I've noticed is that the driver's side low beam, is really 'shaded' at the top, to prevent shining into oncoming traffic. So it doesn't take much road unevenness to cause that edge between light and dark to bounce up-and-down, as seen on either the road surface or other objects ahead of me.

 

Up and down, pretty sure there was little relation to the road surface almost like a light show, transition seemed smooth vs. jumpy. I probably used the wrong word to describe.

 

Ok, just an update. the headlight bobbing has not returned. I drove the car all weekend at night and the headlights were steady and solid. I'm guessing this was an anomaly.

I did pull the rear tail light and replaced the brake bulb. It was a pretty easy job. I just replaced with a sylvania bulb as specified in the parts manual. There were LED versions, but $12 a bulb seemed pretty steep... compared to $5 for 2 incandescent. Dash message is gone and brake light has been restored.

Anyone change their til lights to LED bulbs? Problems?

I have a headlamp side bulb out and one front fog lamp out. The fog lamp was not available at the retail parts store (Autozone) so I'll need to find another source.