Aftermarket HID lights on a new to me 2007. Not sure I want them...

That is not good...

Yes, and they're terrible.

Since it was a halogen setup, there are now ballasts and a relay kit installed (hopefully!) that takes the skinny halogen wiring and uses it as a trigger line for a beefier line to +12v to power the more power hungry HID ballasts. You should be able to disconnect the relay kit thereby disconnecting the ballast, remove the bulb, install halogen, and go off on your way. No need to remove the wiring or ballasts, but it will just be dead weight.

Driving with stock Prius halogens is driving at night with you holding a torch/flashlight out the window on the road. Once you go to HID lights, it is really hard to go back to the crap that is halogen. Even LEDs don't match up to HIDs but last much much longer, so there's that.

If you want to keep the HIDs and not blind drivers you really need to replace the reflectors. Unfortunately they aren't projectors so you can't just cover the small squirrel finder and be done.

I have tested out and left installed a halogen projector kit from eBay in one of my Prii. The projector is mid-level in terms of beam spread and even-ness and the hole for throwing up light (squirrel finder) is too large as they are made for halogen lights. But covering the hole up a bit, and they make great lights. Since you already have the expensive stuff, I would highly recommend just getting a pair of halogen projectors off of eBay made for the GenII Prius, spending an hour modifying them and enjoy the beautiful light.

 

If the lights are actually blue, then that's not good. If the lights are bright white with a blue-ish tint and a blue cutoff, then that's good.

This is BAD:



This is good:



And the left picture is basically what you have now, the colour temperature may be different though. The image on the right is what you want. A sharp cutoff line, bright even spread of light below that.

 

You hadn't said anything about going this direction but I'm going to throw it out there....
If for some reason you are thinking about going to factory HIDs, they are prone to failure. Also Toyota bulbs are ~$150 apiece.
Plus the ballasts can be trouble as well. A few hundred bucks for ballasts if they go out.

 

Yellow cuts through fog but is dimmer than comparable blue-white light. That "stupid blue tint" is desirable because it allows you to see better in low light situations. The human eye picks up blues much better than any other colour. When a light is blue, it takes less actual lumens for it to appear as bright as an equivalent red or yellow or even plain white light. It usually as high as a factor of 6 or so. Even in your TV when the blue LED gets turned on the intensity is turned down by almost 3x of the red and 6x of the green. That's why there's a standard RGB mixing ratio of 3:6:1 for Red:Green:Blue. 1 unit of blue is equal to 3 units of red or 6 units of green.

Also why all emergency service lights are BLUE as it can be picked up easily even in low quantities in peripheral vision.

Some pictures of the reflector as it is now might be helpful too while you have daylight.

A reflector is the old style of headlight. Light shines out in all angles. Any that shines behind the bulb gets "reflected" off of the mirrored surface behind the bulb and due to the many facets of the reflector, gets shot out in a beam pattern kind of like a big bulb.



A projector is completely different. The bulb is inside a parabolic completely smooth mirrored reflector area that you cannot see. All the light bounces around and reflects into a lens minus what is blocked by the cutoff plate. That lens then focuses and inverts the light and spreads a perfect beam around if it is a good lens. The picture below shows the shield and it can move via the soldenoid and that makes the light go up higher, aka high beams without an actual separate light source.

 

That's not terrible.

Well you are in the minority but it is your car. The blue tint does look brighter. And unless you are a cyborg they *are* brighter to your brain. If you take measurements with a luminosity meter, it won't be brighter. But that's not how your brain works, and the white-blue light is bright. Those bulbs look like 4300K-5000K range bulbs which are a great colour.

I can honestly say I have never heard anyone complain before of the low beam light going too far. That's the entire point. When you're driving down the highway at 80mph, you want the light throw to be very far infront of the vehicle so you can see everything. Similarly you want it wide so that you can see everything around you. This is what you pay extra for. If you want to drive with little pin-hole view halogens go for it. But you're throwing away money downgrading something so you better keep the car a while.

This is true of any single bulb system. One bulb produces a static amount of light. If all of that light is reflected or projected into a square area then you can easily see the brightness is related to the total light over the square area illuminated. When you flip the high beam switch the bulb moves back in the socket with the stock reflector and that causes the beam pattern to go up. But you have the same amount of light from the bulb, so now it is dimmer everywhere. That's what high beams are for. In the US all the signs have a coating made to take small amounts of light and reflect the entire sign back back. And that is why there is a small amount of light thrown up with your low beams, the purpose of the squirrel finders on a HID projector setup. High beams apart from signalling are just to see more, but you give up intensity. If you have a dual bulb setup, then you are adding an additional light when the high beams turn on. Many cars have that setup where the highbeam is a separate filament or bulb.

I would advise just driving with it for a while. I would be very surprised if you don't like it once you get used to it "being different". Apart from you, it is universally accepted as a superior solution. You can't even buy luxury cars with halogen setups anymore.

If you still hate it in a few weeks of night driving, then change the bulbs. Get some 3000K to 4000K bulbs. If you get the "+" versions then they won't colour shift after 1000 hours and will stay that colour.

 

Get 4300K HID bulbs, that's oem pure white light without any blue.

Here's 4300K aftermarket HID bulbs in my oem projectors with the squirrel finder cutouts blocked. The parking stall lines are white in this garage, and appear white in this picture:

 

Hi Eric (waves). I might visit you one of these days for a traction battery eval/refresh.

Let me push back on your statement a little:

So HID bulbs are basically arc lamps, which have a ballpark 4000 hour lifetime. I did the math a while back and it worked out to about 4-6 years of typical driving (lots of people don't drive at night, so longer for them), which is about how long people had their cars before typically posting here for advice. I think a couple model year Priuses had bulbs that went out sooner, but those mostly got warranteed (I think they replaced both the bulbs and ballasts). While toyota retail pricing on the D4R HID bulbs is about $140, you can find them online for like $120. Even cheaper if you just buy the Phillips bulbs off Amazon or something for like $55 (funny story, my bought-off-eBay assumed-to-be-fake HID bulbs lasted longer than the genuine Phillips bulbs that I got off Amazon - to their credit, Phillips did warranty them).

If it makes you feel any better, that's a pretty high-dollar HID kit. Not exactly the questionable-quality $50 specials that you find all the time online and at the back of some car shows (although some of those are surprisingly effective). The reflector design isn't ideal, but the pattern doesn't look too terrible. You can always do a retrofit, as some members here have (paging F8L?) though it's not easy nor cheap (although the results are quite something - TSX projectors are often used since those known to be are some of the best HID systems).

 

Your car is older than mine and I've been thorough 2 sets of bulbs already. That the bulbs have been replaced should not be in any way surprising.

You can ask F8L since I'm pretty sure he still hangs out on here. Here's his HID thread: Headlight projector retrofit - HIDs to the max! | PriusChat

You can find quite a few more if you search for HID retrofit. It is a lot of work and I'm hesitant to do it myself.