If your car’s headlights are busted, broken, or just too dim to light up the road ahead clearly, you’re faced with the task of installing a whole new set of headlights.  While you can certainly just unscrew those halogen headlight bulbs that came with your car and replace them with newer versions of the same bulb type, you can also choose to install headlight technology that requires far fewer replacements down the road.  Sure, HIDs have to be installed, but once the initial ballasts, wire harnesses, and other components have been taken care of, you can just as easily install a new set of HID bulbs as you could a set of halogen ones on your car initially.  So for a head-to-head comparison between HIDs and halogens, let’s see how the two stack up.

Visual Capacity

Headlights are first and foremost designed to make sure you can see when driving in the dark.  Halogen headlights have been lighting the roads up for years, so one could argue that they do a solid enough job.  While that’s true, HID kits can outperform halogens in many ways, so instead of sufficient, you get masterful.  These headlights can emit light that is up to three times brighter than halogens, providing a greater visual range for additional preemptive maneuvers.  Furthermore, High Intensity Discharge headlights provide for an enhanced peripheral radius, so you can more easily notice pedestrians and moving wildlife at the edges of the road.

Safety

Building off of these visual improvement are the safety assets of HID use.  They produce light that appears more like daylight to people’s eyes than halogens do, resulting in less strained eyes that won’t tire as easily.  When you’re driving down the highway for hours at night, it’s easy for the eyes to get tired, and that can increase your risk of incident.  HIDs also emit light that reflects well off of official road signs, so it’s harder to miss an important notice or posting that can make you more aware of your surroundings and what’s coming up ahead on the road.

Efficiency

No one wants to waste energy unnecessarily or spoil away time that doesn’t need to be lost.  Though HID headlights do require a longer initial installation time, they only need to be replaced very rarely, as seen by their bulb longevity that stretches up to ten times longer than the lifespan of a typical halogen bulb.  Better yet, these bulbs have fewer parts that could potentially break when being handled, so there are fewer chances of damage to the bulbs over time.  And with a more energy efficient design that reduces energy being expended as heat instead of light, these bulbs also waste less energy, making it more available to your car’s other systems.