That's the problem I find, where confusion arises.
I call them Xenon's not HID's. All manufacturers I deal with normally, VX, Land Rover, Merc, Daimler/Jaguar all refer to vehicles having Xenon headlights.
I wouls say HID's are only aftermarket, I've yet to see a manufacturer call lights HID's. There may be some, but all I know call them Xenon's.
Then you get the xenon halogen bulbs you mentioned. Which aren't xenon really at all. They're just playing to the stupid side of people, they think oooh I can have xenon headlights for a fraction of the cost of an oe system, when they're nothing alike.
Quartz-halogen lamps use a halogen gas inside a quartz glass tube. The quartz glass gets hot enough that atoms of metal that have burnt off the filiament evaporate and are carried back to the filiament by the halogen gas. The earliest ones used iodine gas (in the 1960's). Xenon is a halogen gas. Recently manufacturers have had success getting Quartz-halogen lamps to work better by using xenon.
Discharge lamps have been used for years for street lighting. Very efficient but they needed great big transformers and ballasts to generate the voltage and control the current. Also the light wasn't very easy to focus (it wasn't an intense point source) and the element used to generate the visible light (sodium) gave of a flat orange light.
Recent developments in electronics have allowed the control gear to fit in a box the size of a packet of cigarettes. This is the really clever bit. Xenon gas has been used for the High Intensity Disharge tube because it gives off light which approximates to daylight.
I blame the marketing departments. Xenon sounds clean and modern. HID more accurately describes the process though.
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Topic: xeon headlights (Read 1096 times)