2005 HID Headlight Issue......

Intermittent HID light is a known problem for older cars. In 99% of cases its due to an aging bulb. I had a problem very similar to yours and i fixed it by replacing just one bulb (I don't care about slight color difference between headlights).
You can have a reputable company aftermarket bulb (e.g. General Electric) for ~ $50, and you can replace yourself.
You do not need to replace the ballast, most likely.

- Alex

 

We had a costumer bring in a car with the same issue.
We changed out the bulbs and we still had the same issue.

You want to check the wires that go to the computer module, for the HID lights.
The computer module is located on the bottom of the head light.
Sometimes the wires will corrode and that causes a bad connection.
Once we cleaned it off the head lights stopped turning off.

Also can also buy some glue type silicone that will prevent it in the future.

 

It sounds like its the connector, you should check all of the wires to be safe.

You might have to pull off the head lights to clean it comfortably.

Daniel

 

The most obvious solution is to change the bulb. What you describe is the classic dead bulb. Remember that HID bulbs do not just die like halogens. The technology is completely different and the wear out mechanism is completely different. If you are curious, you can read this: Not all HID Bulbs are created equal | PriusChat

When the bulb is dead, it no longer ignites first try. That is when you need to replace it, not when it no longer ignites at all.

Now this is like having a cough. Ask 100 people and almost all will say it is a cold, but it still might be pneumonia. It is just not common. Likewise, it extremely likely it is just the bulb. Replace the pair (yes both, yes at the same time) and the problem will go away. If this just started, then your left side bulb might still be OK. So swap the left bulb into the right socket and the right bulb into the left socket. If the problem follows the bulb (i.e. the drivers side now no longer ignites to plasma stage) then it is even more conclusive that it is the bulb. If the problem does not follow and remains on the right side, it is still very possible it is bulb assuming the swapped bulb was replaced around the same time as it should have been. But it is also more possible than before than the ballast itself, the connection/connector from ballast to bulb, or the connection/connector from car to ballast could be faulty, dirty, intermittent, etc.

So in summation:

1) Go swap your bulbs.
2) If the problem persists, pull the housings and clean the contacts with some alcohol.
2b) If the problem is solved, buy 2 new genuine bulbs not from eBay or Amazon and continue enjoying your car.
3) If the problem persists, inspect as much as the wiring that is visible. It is possible a rodent has decided to chew on it or similar
4) If you need to replace the wiring, that is expensive. I would just patch it with solder and heatshrink.
5) Still no problem, buy 2 new bulbs and hope the problem goes away.
6) If the wiring is OK, the contacts are clean, the bulbs are new, and you still have the problem, buy a ballast on eBay and swap it out.
7) If the problem still persists, you are very unlucky and we'll go further.

 

This is typical HID Xenon lamp failure and the more you recycle the power for the one that is already bad the quicker the second one will die. They recommend at least two minutes off time before turning HID back on. I suffered the same thing at 65,000 miles, recycling the lights for months. When I changed them, the problem went away for another 65,000 miles. I drive with my headlights on all the time because of the traffic where I live/commute. Replace both.
There are several good videos and pictorial tutorials. This one is good, but buy name brand lamps from a reputable source like Amazon.
Toyota Prius: How to Replace the Headlight Bulbs (HID and Halogen) - PriusDIY.com

 

Yup sounds like the bulb is burned out. Normal every day wear and tear, the bulbs go eventually.

Well if you want the same bulb at the same colour temperature, then the 85126 is what you want. It is a D2R bulb. I am pretty sure the 2004-2005 HIDs are D2R while the 2006-2009 are D4R. I converted mine to D2S long ago.

The problem is that the cheap counterfeit bulbs are more available than the genuine bulbs. And tricky retailers are keen to sell you cheap knockoffs at genuine prices because few can spot the differences. Take a look at the thread I mentioned before (Not all HID Bulbs are created equal | PriusChat). I wrote a whole section on counterfeit bulbs there with images.

Amazon sells real bulbs... sometimes. The marketplace is unregulated and is a crap shoot. If you buy from Amazon directly you will probably get genuine bulbs. But Amazon buys from other retailers, usually in their own marketplace and just stocks it at their warehouse. So their inventory is all over the map when multiple sellers claim the same product but they are mostly fakes.

In town, the only places are generally dealerships. Lexus, Toyota, Acura, Landrover, Mercedes, etc all have cars that use these Phillips bulbs. Expect to pay upwards of $100 per bulb.

The other way to go is to knowingly buy aftermarket, but high quality bulbs like the Morimoto bulbs. Buy from TRS (The Retrofit Source) to make sure they are genuine: D2R: Morimoto 3Five (35w) - HID Bulbs from The Retrofit Source Inc

These bulbs while not genuine Phillips, are very high quality aftermarket and in some ways superior to the Phillips, otherways not as much. But for the price, it is generally worth it. You also then get a choice of colour temperature. 4300K is the standard yellow and what you have now. 3000K is fog light yellow (illegal as headlamp beams everywhere in the US). 5000K is the white that the 4300K bulbs shift to after 100 or so hours. So the 5000K will actually look like what you have now while the 4300K will look yellower. But give it 100 hours and the 4300K bulbs will be white while the 5000K bulbs will be whiteish blue. Or go 6000K for a blue-ish look that while is actually less bright, looks brighter because of the tricks the human cones in your eyes plays being more sensitive to blue light than red or green (Also illegal as headlamps).

I don't have sticky authority on this forum.

I know what I talk about with HID bulbs. I have done many retrofits, and love the light output. I currently have a pair of Lexus RX350 AFS projectors with Acura TSX clear lenses and 1.5mm cereal spacers in my Prius. Looks amazing.

 

I have a 2006 with HID. Burned out the first set at ~65K (DIY). Second set ~120K - 12 months ago (DIY). Now the right bulb is going out. So, I have a few questions but first I would like to say that these lights have been lousy since day one. When I asked Toyota to check them they simply said they were "within spec". Nowhere near as good as on my 2001 Subaru Forester and Toyota charged ~$1K for these "great headlights". I can try the "switch the bulbs" suggested above and then go from there but I am also intrigued by the idea of total replacement. 2K1 Toaster mentioned that he changed to D2S bulbs a long time ago. Are there advantages to that? Can you tell me more about the Lexus LS350 AFS projectors with Acura TSX clear lenses? Cost? Sources? DIY or Dealer? Thanks for any help.

 

I am curious why you think 55K miles for headlight bulbs is a lousy life? The $1K extra charge includes different wiring harnesses, a reflector housing with an electromechanical shield for lows vs. brights, ballasts, and the bulbs themselves. A couple hundred dollars in just parts even on the used market, and not including any engineering or manufacturing time/effort as well as the standard profit margin on options.

The D4R bulbs you have (2006 stock HID right?) seem to be lasting OK. When I did food deliveries I was going through a set of halogen bulbs every month. Sure they were cheaper, but it actually ended up costing more having to replace them more frequently. Not to mention that a burned out headlight was enough to be refused entry into some of the guarded federal installations we delivered to. D4x (D4R and D4S) bulbs are very superior to halogen but IMHO D2x (D2R and D2S) bulbs are superior to D4x bulbs. The only problem is the mercury content when it comes time for disposal.

Total replacement involves complete replacement of the housings and ballasts.

The cheap, illegal, easier, and not so great way of doing it is to buy aftermarket halogen projector housings and put HID bulbs in there. As I have mentioned lots of places around here, this is a very bad idea. Too much light will be thrown above the cutoff, you will blind oncoming traffic. These housings would allow you to put in H11 halogen bulbs:



Or you can purchase cheap aftermarket bulbs that are HID bulbs with a H11 base. These are also a bad idea because no actual bulb company like Phillips will make a bulb like this. These will all be cheap reject bulbs. You can find bulb base adapters to take genuine Phillips bulbs to H11 bases, but then the focal point will be off because the bulb is too far from the new base point and it will be bad output as well.

So that's how to do it cheaply without making anything and can be done in an hour after buying all the parts. Direct swap.

The correct way of doing it is called a retrofit. A good retrofitter can do it in a couple days. Your first time might take a few weekends. This consists of taking the headlights off the car, baking them in an oven and prying them apart to access the reflector housings. Then taking actual projectors from wrecked/salvaged cars and mounting them rigidly into the reflector housings. These 2 things are never meant to mate and it is not simple at all. If the projector is rotated slightly your output will be rotated. The 2 have to be perfectly aligned. And then ontop of that, car headlights are not flat straight lines so getting them to align is a horrible problem.

I generally tackle the problem by gluing them into the housing with JBWeld with the bulbs on while completely mounted on the car parked on a level surface about 25ft away from a wall. Rotate, align, and level the bulbs while it is drying and then leave the car alone for at least 24 hours to cure. Then you can remove and as long as you don't break the weld, you can then go back and permanently affix the projectors to the housing with more glue, welds, bolts, whatever. There are methods of dynamic mounting, but that is not a first time project.

You asked it seems specifically about my setup. I personally find the RX AFS projectors the best on the market, second only to the GS extra wide projectors. These come from wrecked Lexus RX330, RX350, RX400h, and RX450h SUVs that had the Adaptive Front-Lighting System (AFS) where the projectors turn with the steering wheel to illuminate corners. The bowl shape is perfect for light output. However, they have a few different lenses on them, and some are dimpled (like a golf ball), some have little concentric lines etched in them, some have more rigorous etching, but basically all are designed to diffuse the light at the edges so that it doesn't have a sharp cutoff. However, I prefer the sharp razor edge cutoff that clear lenses provide. This also provides that beautiful blue hue you see on the edges of the projected light, but brilliant white light on the ground. This is often attempted to be imitated by people installing blue/purple lights into the car which is just stupid. And also completely illegal.

Here is a DMC-12 with halogen lights in my garage:


And here is the Prius with the Lexus RX AFS projectors with Acura TSX Clear Lenses:


Note that it slopes up a bit from the garage floor so you can see the cutoff nicely. Notice how there is a defined line from dark to light, that is the cutoff. Then if you look at the colour of the stripe you will see it is very blue while the light is very white. This is essentially ideal.

Here is an easier to see projector line on a garage door:

 

Perhaps the thing to do is just to replace the bulbs with genuine Philips. Can I use the D2R in my 2006 Prius without any modifications? Is there any reason not to do this other than needing to dispose of them legally since they contain mercury? Any recommended (reliable) sources? Home Depot shows the Philips available for $69.99?

 

You should always replace with genuine suppliers. See the not all HID bulbs are created equal thread to see what aftermarket HID bulbs can do. Destruction of the entire reflector is a pretty major expense for saving a few bucks on bulbs.

You can NOT use D2x in D4x sockets. You can dremel the tab away to use D4R bulbs in D4S and visa versa but the focal point and light won't be the same. The "R"s have a shield that dims the light in projectors generally.

The main problem is the ballasts. You could mangle the base to make it physically fit. However the D4x ramp down to 36V when steady state and D2x ramp down to 85V. Running D4x bulbs in D2x sockets will work, however it will shorten the life of the bulb. You are constantly over-firing it. Running a D2X bulb in a D4X socket means it will flash on for the startup and then die when the resting voltage goes below the nominal 85V to rest at 36V. So no, it won't work.

You would have to change the ballasts which would be easy to do with almost any other Toyota or Lexus D2S or D2R ballast since Denso made them all the same size so it should be direct placement. Wiring into the ballast may need massaging. But then you will have the wrong bulb base on the headlight, so you would then need the dremel or something else custom.

And really, the stock reflectors on the Prius are some of the worst I have ever seen apart from american vehicles. It's not really worth that kind of time investment to end up with crappy output. Actually the output from the stock reflectors is almost as bad as the aftermarket projectors with HIDs in them. If you modify the aftermarket projectors to block the squirrel finders, and aim them low, I think you'd be happier with a very small amount of work. Still not optimal though.

 

So is there a way to get satisfactory headlights without spending $500+ in your opinion? If so, be specific as to the "recommendations". While your idea with the Lexus RX lights is appealing, the description of the work required makes it sound as if is not for the DIY that does not have a lot of experience with dealing with headlights. The other choice seems to be to buy the Philips D4R bulbs and just accept the fact that I will have to replace them every year or 2. Thanks.

 

Satisfactory is very much an opinion piece. I would not be satisfied with less than what I had now which is near the best.

If you spend $300 on the aftermarket projector housings and then another $100 on D2S H11 base eBay bulbs kit with cheap ballasts it will look better than the stock reflector HIDs.Just please aim them low so you don't blind oncoming drivers.

When I did my first retrofit I had no idea what I was doing. By buying extra housings you can just swap the old ones in after your allotted weekend work period ends and it is not done. There is a really good community on HIDPlanet.com.

I am not sure why that is any different than other bulbs. Keep in mind that the bulbs are more effected by plasma effects instead of on-time. So even if you only use them for 10 minutes at a time 3 times a night, that is worse for them then using them for 3 hours once a night. Just like if your lights are off and then you "flash" someone which requires them to turn on and off and on and off. This will wear them out very quickly because you are doing repeated hot starts. If your driving style is wearing them out prematurely, then a change to D2S will be somewhat of a waste.