Headlights are almost as inevitable as death, or taxes. No matter what vehicle you drive, it will be equipped with some sort of headlight bulb, or headlight housing. Headlights are a critical part of your vehicle used to illuminate the area ahead of you.
Good, functional headlights are absolutely critical; and not just to provide that light for a dark curve, or show you the deer about to cross the road. Properly functioning lights, including parking lights, turn signals, brake lights, and running lights; are important for making sure YOU get noticed by other drivers.
No matter whether you have a car, or truck, Ford or Chevy – you’ll have headlights, tail-lights, brake lights, and turn signals, and they’ll be powered by the electrical system.
Often, these lights are still ‘bulbs’ or ‘lamps.’ Your car or truck will have a special housing on both sides of the vehicle, that holds multiple bulbs. These bulbs have small electrical wires, or filaments, that glow white hot when electrical power is run through them. By bouncing, and directing that glow forward with reflective lenses; the vehicle is able to cast light beams in front of you, to light up obstacles, and let you see at night.
This design is cheap, somewhat efficient, and has been in use for decades. However, the downside, is that the wire that glows when electrified, also gets very hot, and wears down over time because of that heat. This means that the filament can grow brittle, and break.
Once the filament is broken, the electrical connection is no longer complete, and the bulb cannot ‘light up.’ This type of design is a halogen bulb, or halogen headlight.
This is what happens when a headlight, turn signal, or brake light, ‘burns out.’ It literally means that the filament that creates light, has burnt and will no longer connect. This can be an annoyance, if a turn signal or parking light burns out. It can be dangerous when a headlight or brake light burns out; making you unable to see properly, or sometimes, unable to be seen properly by other drivers.
In a lot of places, driving with a burnt out light, whether headlights, taillights, or brake or turn signals; can result in a ticket and/or fine.
This makes it important to be sure the lights on your vehicle are functioning properly; at all times. Not just to avoid trouble with ‘headlight tickets;’ but also so you, and your family can stay safe.
With a lot of modern vehicles, it can be hard to check, or replace light bulbs. This has become a common problem. Cars and trucks have gotten more complicated, and as more technology is stuffed into them; less room is available to access parts for maintenance and repair.
We often see vehicles that require hours of disassembly, just to be able to access a single light bulb. Some modern muscle cars, require rivets to be drilled out to access the headlights for the first time. These kinds of difficulties all factor into headlight replacement cost.
Because of these difficulties, a lot of people search for how much a car headlight cost of replacement might be, before having work done.
Car light replacement can be quite expensive with modern vehicles. Sometimes even turn signal bulb replacement is a pricey subject. But it all boils down to how difficult it is to change out the light; and what kind of light bulb you need.
If you have a vehicle that appears to require a difficult process to change a simple light bulb – it is best to find a reputable repair shop to have the work done. Sometimes, there are strange issues you won’t know about until someone can check the repair manual and see what special difficulties can arise.
Take for example a modern Mazda 3 Series. If you have the model with adaptive lighting, you could find yourself with all sorts of error messages on the dash after a simple headlight bulb change. You might find your headlights pointing in the wrong directions while turning corners!
This is because of a system called Adaptive Lighting. A lot of newer vehicles have complicated systems that control the headlights, brakes, cruise control, and more. These systems are designed to help you stop in emergencies, help keep you from hitting pedestrians and obstacles, and in general, make driving safer for you and those around you.
In order to properly add extra control to your driving, however, these systems use precision calibrated cameras, radar and lidar sensors, and a lot of software, to very precisely measure the world around your car. Small errors, even down to having a headlight bulb off by millimeters; can make these systems malfunction.
Some manufacturers (like the Mazda in question) require that the cameras and sensors be reset each time parts of the car come apart. There are many modern vehicles that require these special systems be re-calibrated after a headlight change. Sometimes resets are required only after replacing a headlight assembly.
However, many modern vehicles are coming equipped with LED headlights – and this makes things even more difficult. If/when an LED fails, it is an electronic part of the headlight assembly itself – usually not changeable like a halogen headlight bulb. This sometimes means that a failed LED light, requires the entire light lens assembly to be replaced.
Often, the costs of headlight assembly replacement is very high. Sometimes LED headlamp housings can cost more than $1,000 per headlight. The upside to this is that often, these modern LED lights are designed to lasts for millions of hours of operation, and hopefully, won’t require changing until quite far into the car’s lifetime.
With all this complexity surrounding a simple change of a headlight, turn signal light, or brake light; it is easier to understand why light bulb changes have gotten more expensive over the years. With the rising cost of light bulb replacement in modern vehicles – it is important to plan out theses repairs, instead of waiting for a light to just burn out.
There are several vehicles now that require a half day or more in a repair shop, just to take apart what is required to change out a turn signal, fog light, or headlight bulb. This means it’s not something you can just have done right when it happens.
Often, a quality auto repair shop will recommend replacing all of the bulbs, whether they are burnt out or not, during such an extensive repair. This way the customer isn’t having to deal with the inconvenience of having a car in the shop for repeated bulb failures, and they aren’t having to pay multiple times for multiple disassembly.
If you are in need of light bulb repairs or headlight replacement in the Springfield area, please reach out to one of our locations, or feel free to schedule an appointment with our online scheduler!
