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I ordered this kit last winter, it was very easy to install everything was plug and play. i was happy at the time. This kit is made by JD-Lighting and i bought it through Password JDM.

The neat thing about this kit is that there is a coil inside of the bulb that gets energized when it receives the high beam signal, that mechanically shifts the bulb outwards; changing the bulbs position inside of the head light housing which emulates what the high beam filament of a dual filament bulb would do. The down side to this is that the bulbs are proprietary, and i have not looked into replacements but I'm assuming they are pricey.

After a few days the passenger side would not come on after turning the headlights on. Battery and charging system on vehicle are perfect, steady 14.6 -14.7 volts with engine running. It seemed like it did this more in the cold, and after a few minutes of driving, revving the engine and flicking the headlight switch on and off, the bulb would eventually come on. The wire hardness on this kit has both power wires going to one node at the fuse which hooks to battery +. the passenger side headlight has a longer wire, causing a voltage drop to the passenger side bulb. this would help my theory that when i revved the engine a little, the passenger bulb would finally come on. Even though this is unacceptable, it seems like there was a failure mode related to voltage input on the passenger side ballast.

After this i had the lights running into the spring (warmer weather), and the passenger side started becoming dimmer with time. a few times it turned on and was a very dull purple color, and when i say dull i mean useless as a headlight.

eventually this bulb died, and i drove around for a few days with one headlight. A few days later the driver side went out, so I was forced to drive home at night with no headlights. I interchanged bulbs and ballast, trying to figure out what the problem was. I took the kit to my electronics lab and gave them proper voltage from a good power supply. Nothing worked so i returned them.

shipping them from coast to coast to Password JDM, and then waiting for Password to ship them or deliver them to JD-lighting took some a couple weeks. Then shipping back to me was a few more weeks. The second kits seemed to be a newer design, the Ballast were a lot bigger than the previous kit, and the mounting hardware was a lot nicer.

The next kit i took time to run the wires a lot nicer, mount everything well, turn them on, and nothing. to make sure i wasn't crazy, i had my friend double check everything. checking fuses, voltages, grounds (the grounds i routed were awesome, used inside toothed lock washers and scuffed paint away from the chassis to mount the ring terminals), and all voltages were more than adequate.

took them up to the lab again to test, just to rule out them not working on the vehicle. I wasn't going to tear these apart and figure out what was wrong, but i was going to prove to myself that it had nothing to do with any installation error. i have over ten years of automotive electronics installation experience, mechanic experience, and I am an EE with experience in automotive electronics design. This was my argument when they tried to tell me that the kits are "double tested" before they leave JD.

After sending this kit back, I no longer wanted a replacement. Automotive electronics are Class III products that have to handle extreme temperatures, road vibration, and electrical noise problems. Having your headlights not work could be a very dangerous scenario, so the fact that I had two of these kits fail on me is enough to make me not want to go with this setup anymore.

One design problem I noticed with the JD-lighting ballast is that the encapsulation (potting) they use inside of the Ballast is a very high durometer thermoset. This type of potting was popular in automotive electronics in the 90's and is today considered by the automotive community to be problematic. This hard plastic type of potting does not allow for thermal expansion, does not provide any dampening for mechanical shock, and out of the available encapsulation materials today does not do a good job of dispersing heat. Below are some pictures where you can see the contracted stress cracks in this material just from the production process alone. Over time this type of encapsulation actually gets harder and causes electrical components to fatigue and crack prematurely.

Summary

In summary, I am really impressed with how innovative this kit is, and i hope maybe JD Lighting will run by this post and make some changes to their product. I would love to have high and low beam HID's from a single bulb.

If I in fact received two different kits that both coincidentally were a bad few out of a couple hundred batch, that is very unfortunate. However Seeing as there are not many reviews on this kit, looking at a few quick design points without actually reverse engineering the kit, and looking at the quality of the general assembly that was done I would have to conclude that this kit is not something I would recommend. I would also like to stress again that a failing headlight system in your vehicle will jeopardize your safety.

Digressing from this product Review, the customer service I experiences was below average even for my already low standard I have for the aftermarket automotive industry.

thanks for reading.


-Snodedons.