Replacing Nissan Leaf fog light bulbs

[arekvi]

I got my Nissan Leaf in October 2013, a great car I love to drive. It is a Tekna edition with LED head lights. I expected all lights on this car to be energy saving bright LEDs, but I was disappointed to find that most lights are energy wasting incandescent bulbs, even on the more expensive Tekna edition. I have started replacing all incandescent bulbs, which was quite an easy task that didn’t cost me much. The fog lights, however, are one exception. On European Leaf cars, two 13W incandescent lamps in the fog lights are functioning as daytime running lights. I planned to replace these with two LED bulbs to save energy and give better visibility. This turned out to be quite a riddle that I still haven’t solved. I have tried to reach the lamps from underneath the car by removing various parts, but I didn’t succeed. I don’t want to disassemble a new car just to replace some bulbs, so if anyone has a description on how to replace the fog light bulbs on a Nissan Leaf, it would be greatly appreciated!

[knightarmor]

In the U.S. the foglights are standard 55W bulbs, You just pull a few screws (10mm socket required) out of the front splash guard under the front bumper and you can access the bulbs. I have replaced mine with 35W HIDs. Do you have pictures of what your Tekna model lights look like? Are you in the UK?

[arekvi]

Thank you for your help! I'll give it a second try, and try to remove the splash guard. My car and I are in Norway, but I guess the fog lights are the same on all models. Each fog light on my car has a 55W H7 bulb and a 13W wedge bulb. It's the latter that functions as daytime running lights, which I want to replace by LEDs as they are on most of the time the car is running.

[knightarmor]

Cool, I've replaced most of the wedge bulbs on mine with LED as well. Our fog lights do not have wedge bulbs in them, only the main bulb.

[quattro]

Cool, I've replaced most of the wedge bulbs on mine with LED as well. Our fog lights do not have wedge bulbs in them, only the main bulb.

Are what's being referred to as "wedge" bulbs actually G9 bulbs?

[Pomonabill220]

Seems like this thread is old, but I wanted to get some help.
I just bought a 2018 Leaf SV and for the life of me, I cannot figure out HOW to get to the fog lights!
The most I can see is that I have to remove the front bumper as the lights don't seem to come out of the opening they are in.
Really seems like a poor design as they would have to be replaced sometime.

I also had a heck of a time getting to the stock horn as it seems to be buried and the only way was up through under the car and removing alot of crap to get to it.

In the past I have worked on other friend's Nissans (not leafs), and I always thought the engineering was poor for accessibility.... guess they haven't changed!

I love the car, but working on it is a real PAIN!
If anyone has some insight, or a source for a service manual, I would appreciate it!
Thanks and LeafOn!

[powersurge]

Congratulations on the new car....

I would really be wary about starting to take apart a brand new car. The truth is that you really don't save any electricity with LEDs, and the increase in brightness is really for "vanity" reasons. You are well seen by others with the regular bulbs, and unless you are in an area of total darkness wilderness, you really don't see any better....

Also, what you DO do is.. Blind other drivers with too bright LED bulbs in lenses that are focused for the Halogen bulb.... Not LEDs..

[Pomonabill220]

Thank you for the reply! and thanks for the welcome!
I TOTALLY agree about just throwing any old LED into a light, and blinding drivers just for vanity reasons.
My Leaf has the projector housings for the low beams, and I compared the beam pattern of the stock halogens to one of my leds, and the pattern was EXACTLY the same! I was pleased about that and driving to work in the dark, I see a very well defined beam with a sharp cutoff that is horizontal. In other words, being close to a stopped car I noted the cutoff point on their bumper, then as we were moving and the distance between my car and the car infront of me increased, the beam remained at the same point on the front car's bumper.

I see WAY too many cars and trucks where the beam is all over the place and blinding to me, so I know they did not know what they were doing.

Also, my fogs are pointing down and not straight ahead. I do use my fogs when I have to travel down my alley to get to my place, or side streets that are dark, so I do not use them for vanity, but I want to see where I am going.

Even the original haloges low beams were ok, but just a little too dark for me.

I really just want to adjust the fogs so they are actually useful, but now they don't do very much, that is why I was asking.

Once again, I completely agree that just throwing some over bright led's in and not paying attention to the beam pattern is utter stupidity!

[atelluscalidus]

Hi.

Norwegian dude here that (somewhat unfortunately) bought a US Leaf without checking specs before buying. So, it appears that US vehicles have no requirements on automatic daylight running lights? That is a REAL problem here because it's actually required by law that any car needs to have lights on the entire time.

Obviously, turning them on manually works, but it so happens to be that the EU Leaf actually uses the fog lights for automatic DRLs and that is what I would like to have on my Leaf as well, but for this to work, I need to apparently do some kind of re-wiring. I don't like to install 3rd party stuff unless it's from the OEM. So no LED bars or other tacky solutions accepted at this point.

Also, since the fog lights can ONLY be turned on when head beams are on *what the...* that is actually against Norwegian traffic policy, that says vehicles must only operate fog lights with the parking lights. I.e. no use with normal head lights. I want to change this as well, in order to comply to Norwegian driving standards.

Anybody able to help me out?

[GerryAZ]

I believe European versions of LEAF have fog lights with a small bulb and large bulb in each unit. The small bulb is for the DRL and the large bulb is the fog light beam. US cars have just the large bulb for fog light use so you will need to add your own DRLs unless you get European fog light assemblies to install and then add wiring for each bulb.