New Headlights!
YAY! My ’04 New Beetle has a new pair of headlights! Have a look:
Here’s the two big reasons the Bug needed new ones:
The drivers side headlight lost its lens and insulation on the wiring inside both headlights had started cracking apart. I’d already tried fixing the lens once when it started coming loose several weeks back. Unfortunately, it popped off somewhere on the road this time and disappeared. It’s a touch difficult to re-attach something if you don’t have it to reattach!
I ran a few searches and called a place town to see what a replacement would cost. A Bosch light was going to run me around $200 for one side. That would have left me with a pair of mismatched lights and not dealt with the crumbling insulation in the other housing. You can’t see it very well in the picture, but that lens is extremely yellowed and more translucent that transparent. Definitely not conducive to good night time vision. Beside, there’s a nasty crack starting around the bottom edge.
Thankfully, I found these guys: http://www.headlightsdepot.com
They had replacement assemblies at $85 a side and $155 a pair. Much better than the $400 plus I was looking at otherwise. They’re site isn’t the best in the world, but it does do a good job of letting you find the what you’re looking for. Where it falls down is letting you track an order after completion. I received an two emails (if I’m remembering this correctly) from the company, with a different order reference number than the the one their site gave me at the time of the order and two different FedEx tracking numbers. One of which was for something being sent to Austin! That’s a good five hours from where my headlights were supposed to be headed.
Needless to say, I was somewhat relieved when the headlights actually arrived!
If you find yourself needing to replace the bulb or full assembly on one of these, take a look at this video:
It’s a touch long, but he does a pretty comprehensive run down of how everything fits together. The driver side light is a good deal more of a pain than the passenger side one. Whoever did the layout for this vehicles engine compartment must have been a sadist to put the latch behind the battery box. SHEESH! Thankfully, this is not something that needs to be done overly frequently.
Now that that’s over with! Time to get back to writing! 😉
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