Halogen headlight replacements
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I second Doug's sentiment, as the LEDs on my 2018 Platinum are by far the brightest headlights of any vehicle I have ever driven in my lifetime... Unsure if swapping out bulbs or entire light assemblies is all you need to do, or if there is a change in wiring harnesses or programming in the computer that needs to be done? @wreedsvt - do you happen to know?
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Had lots of time to ask my Service Manager questions on various topics during my 4-hour 20E04 recall today. I brought up this question to him and my suspicions were correct that this isn't just a matter of swapping bulbs. He said you need to swap out light assemblies and the voltages are different, so wiring harnesses are involved also = he said it is not easy, so much so that he said he will NOT do this in his Service department at my dealership due to cost of parts & complexity. He recommended acquiring the parts from a host/donor vehicle (= wrecked F150 with higher trim level in a salvage yard) that you can move over all of the pieces from, and even after that, there is FORScan programming...
Thanks for info. That sounds like a pain. I did consider swapping with a junkyard donor, even then those seem to be $$$$. I figured that swapping with OEM units, there would be an issue with harness connections. The mention of Forscan programming is disheartening.
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The forscan programming would be the simplest part! Seriously, you need to do forscan on these diesels to get all the goodies Ford hid from us like dpf %, numbers over the gauges, mirror folding on lock and on and on. It really is easy, just takes some research.
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@thegert87 - FORScan programming would probably be the easiest part of the whole job because the programming is merely flipping some bits to switch from standard 12V lights to LEDs = we could probably figure this out if you really wanted to go this route...
Finding the donor vehicle with what you want is probably the biggest challenge. Another thing I just thought of is that the light assemblies in the higher trim levels also include new technology like lane avoidance detection = I remember reading an article in one of the car magazines when the F150s with aluminum body parts came out (in 2015) on the price differential to repair steel vs aluminum and I remember the author calling out the cost of the rear brake light assembly (very $$$) due the technology included beyond the "lighting" part.
Finding the donor vehicle with what you want is probably the biggest challenge. Another thing I just thought of is that the light assemblies in the higher trim levels also include new technology like lane avoidance detection = I remember reading an article in one of the car magazines when the F150s with aluminum body parts came out (in 2015) on the price differential to repair steel vs aluminum and I remember the author calling out the cost of the rear brake light assembly (very $$$) due the technology included beyond the "lighting" part.
Swapping from OEM Halogen to OEM LED is not plug and play. New harness, programming, etc.
If you want to try replacing the halogen bulbs with LED bulbs, I recommend this site. They actually test the bulbs in different trucks and cars and show pictures of the light pattern. However, you should be aware that most aftermarket LED headlight bulbs have a much poorer pattern than the halogens due to different light propagation directions from the LEDs than the halogen bulbs. And good ones aren’t cheap.
www.headlightrevolution.com
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