asimba2
Well-known member
For as well as I feel the Leaf has been engineered, I was pretty surprised to see my SV model fitted with 55 watt halogen (x2) fog lights. Did they forget this car was electric?
Retrofitsource.com was blowing out BMW X5 LED fog lights for a fraction of the retail price. I paid $60 shipped, versus BMW's astronomical $600+ retail price. I knew from experience that these fog lights feature an extra wide beam pattern; CLICK HERE to see the beam pattern on someone else's pickup fog light retrofit.
I started by baking the BMW fog lights in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 degrees to soften the lens gasket, then I removed the LED modules and heatsinks from the BMW housings.
Each module has one LED facing up and one facing down. What I like about this design is oncoming traffic does not get blinded by staring directly at an LED emitter; all the light is indirect with a cutoff effect similar to what you find in an OEM HID projector.
I then fitted the modules inside the stock Leaf housings, so it still uses the Nissan fog light mounts.
I am a little embarrassed to post my hackery, but whatever, I have done this sort of thing many times on 4WDs where the lights get submerged and so far they are all holding up.
Now that the fog lights and the headlights are the same color temperature, I need to deal with the 3000K parking light bulbs. I swapped the bulbs out for Osram LEDs.
Here's the before picture:
And clearly this is the after:
Now all of the lighting is around 5000K in color temperature.
The new fog lights draw 8.4 watts each, as opposed to 55 watts each for the stock fog lights.
This was far from plug-and-play, but I am very happy with the end result. The Leaf now has 100% LED forward lighting, probably like it should have from the factory.
Retrofitsource.com was blowing out BMW X5 LED fog lights for a fraction of the retail price. I paid $60 shipped, versus BMW's astronomical $600+ retail price. I knew from experience that these fog lights feature an extra wide beam pattern; CLICK HERE to see the beam pattern on someone else's pickup fog light retrofit.
I started by baking the BMW fog lights in the oven for 10 minutes at 200 degrees to soften the lens gasket, then I removed the LED modules and heatsinks from the BMW housings.
Each module has one LED facing up and one facing down. What I like about this design is oncoming traffic does not get blinded by staring directly at an LED emitter; all the light is indirect with a cutoff effect similar to what you find in an OEM HID projector.
I then fitted the modules inside the stock Leaf housings, so it still uses the Nissan fog light mounts.
I am a little embarrassed to post my hackery, but whatever, I have done this sort of thing many times on 4WDs where the lights get submerged and so far they are all holding up.
Now that the fog lights and the headlights are the same color temperature, I need to deal with the 3000K parking light bulbs. I swapped the bulbs out for Osram LEDs.
Here's the before picture:
And clearly this is the after:
Now all of the lighting is around 5000K in color temperature.
The new fog lights draw 8.4 watts each, as opposed to 55 watts each for the stock fog lights.
This was far from plug-and-play, but I am very happy with the end result. The Leaf now has 100% LED forward lighting, probably like it should have from the factory.