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Legit and Non-Legit: Why This Matters for BMW Headlights
Every state has its own standards for headlights. For example, California laws only allow for white headlights while Connecticut laws allow for white, yellow or amber headlights.
There are, however, a couple of general rules on headlights: white headlights won’t get you in trouble anywhere in the U.S. while the brightness of the lights shouldn’t be intense enough to blind drivers heading your way.
This does not mean you can’t get the more unique BMW Angel Eyes on the market. Nobody will stop you from buying and installing “off road” lights – most of which are unique and much, much sexier than their street legal counterparts – but you do have to take care where you drive around with them. Driving downtown with purple headlights on and you’ll be likely to get pulled over by the first cop that you pass by.
So the whole argument boils down to this: you get BMW angel eyes that are unique enough to stand out from the generic ones and are safe enough to use on the open road, or you get the really snazzy angel eyes to fit the theme of your car and to strut it around in off road events.
Now that you get the gist of it all, it’s time for us to get to the meat of the discussion – finding and working with the street legal and off road versions.
Street Legal BMW Angel Eyes
Street legal angel eyes are perhaps the easiest sets to find and work with.
If you’re totally new to BMW angel eyes, then it would probably be best if you got your lights from a legitimate dealer that has a strong presence in your area. They will be intimately knowledgeable with state laws, and they can readily help you pick out the ones you can hook up to your car and drive around with.
If you are, however, picking up your own BMW parts and you want to assemble the kit yourself, then you need to be able to know what’s legal and what isn’t.
This is especially important when it comes to the most visible aspect of headlights – the color.
As mentioned earlier, you really can’t go wrong with white angel eyes. These come in halogen, cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) and light-emitting diode (LED) flavors. Each has its own ups and downs, but they’re all legal across America.
The problem here is that some BMW halo lights (another term for BMW angel eyes) will have a yellowish or bluish tinge depending on the lamps you use despite being marked as white. So how do you differentiate the white lamps that look colored and the colored lamps that look white?
It’s actually quite simple: hold up a piece of paper in front of the lit BMW angel eyes. If the light that hits the paper appears white, then you’ve got white headlights. If the light that hits the paper is anything else, then you’ve got a colored lamp on your hands.
Headlight color is the only real problem that BMW users need to worry about. Angel eyes are inherently bright enough to sufficiently light up the road while they are designed to naturally adhere to the angles of light needed for high/low beams.
If you want to be 100% sure you won’t get into trouble, then you can just contact your state’s department of transportation (DOT) or department of motor vehicles (DMV) and inquire about what headlights are legal in your neck of the woods.
Off Road BMW Angel Eyes
If you want to use off road angel eyes, then you open up a whole new world to your car’s aesthetic design.
You can pick out the colors, the brightness and even the angles you want. You can transform your everyday BMW into a fantastic piece of science and art if you want to. You can even pick out a set of angel eyes from any dealer you want since legality is already out of the question.
You must, however, know what to do with your customized car.Most drastic modifications to BMW performance or accessories will put a car out of regular roads. You simply can’t drive around town with a modified engine – much less a set of red, blue and/or purple headlights that are a dead giveaway for modded cars. You simply can’t drive around regular roads with your off road angel eyes. This will effectively leave you with two choices: set your car up for display events or soup it up for racing events.
This means you will need to find an alternative mode of transportation for your non-street legal car. You can simply use another vehicle to tow your car to the event with a tow-bar or an A-frame. You might even get away with driving your car around as long as you don’t need to actually use your BMW angel eyes in the first place.
Here is another practical tip: if you want to customize your car to make it more aesthetically appealing, then it would be best if you contact a community of mod aficionados and work closely with them. Even Internet-based communities will work well for this purpose.
They will not only teach you the basics of working with custom modifications, but they can make modding much more fun and enjoyable too. You will have a community that’ll be excited with you as you successfully install your first BMW angel eyes red halos.
Keep all these in mind and you’ll know what to do with the BMW angel eyes you’ve got with you!