Those of you who have the xenon headlights do you also have driving lights? And if so do the xenons over power them or do you find the driving lights complement or reach or fill out more than the xenons.

 

My has fog lights with the Xenons. They are excellent and at night. Great addition to the car. Should be standard equipment on all cars.

 

I am assuming by "driving lights", you are referring to the grille-mounted spot lamps. I think they do a nice job filling-out distance illumination.

I have both and, while the color temperature of the halogen spot lamps is warmer, the beam is quite a bit more narrow in its focus. After spending an hour or so on a country road aiming the spot lamps, I found them to be a perfect compliment to the xenon headlamps. Note that I have the MINI factory spot lamps, but you can also use other brands (of course!) for their particular characteristics (brightness, beam pattern, etc.). I'm sure there are better spot lamps than the MINI brand (search the forums) but I'm a happy camper.

I find that the xenon high beams project a fairly wide pattern (though narrower than the low beams) and do a terrific job of general distance illumination. However, the addition of the narrower-focused spot lamps "bore" a hole in the center area of the distance illumination. At that range, I felt that color temperature differences were negligible.

It takes a bit of time to align the lamps for maximum distance illumination but it is well worth the effort on a pitch-black night in the country. And, IIRC, Bergen County has its fair share of deer!

YMMV,

 

Koopah,
Thank you. Yes I was referring to the grill mounted lights. I see you know Bergen pretty well. I've had deer in my backyard and coyote in my local park. My gfs parents live around upper greenwood lake and the roads getting back are pretty dark and twisty. I forgot to order my cm-s with the grill driving lights but got the xenons. Prob order the VIP light kit with Hellas.

How do you have yours set up? Do they go on independently or with your highbeams?

Thanks
Sean

 

The typical VPC/Dealer MINI installation has the spot lamps on a separate switch mounted in the left-side dashboard knee bolster. I was dead-set on rewiring them into the high beam circuit, but after trying the separate switch arrangement out for a few months, I'm keeping it as is.

The spot lamps have such a narrow focus that, IMHO, they are best used on long, flat, relatively straight sections of rural road. When I am on the twisties, I find the high beams actually work quite well, and I don't need to have the current draw from the spot lamps.

While most of western MA is hilly, there are valley sections that really do requite something more than the high beams, especially if you are driving at speed. I do a fair amount of summer driving in areas where deer present problems in the evening, but bear and moose are the real "bogies" to watch for!

Now if I could only get my V1 to pick up large quadrupeds...

 

Sean,

I forgot to add something about how the spots turn-on when wired in the MINI way of doing things. You cannot turn-on the spot lamps unless the high beams are selected. This means you have 3 choices: low beams, high beams, and high beams with spot lamps. Obviously, this means you cannot have the spot lamps on without the high beams lit.

You may wish to wire the VIP system differently, but in six months I have never needed to have the spot lamps on with the low beams or without headlamps at all. Also, the MINI wiring arrangement makes it easy to kill the spot lamps with light stalk instead of reaching down for the button on the knee bolster.

HTH,

 

Koop,
Thanks. One other question. Do you have your DRLs disabled? Wouldn't mind running just parking/lower fogs. Have my drls(especially with the xenons) disabled and not have to drive with the on in the day time.

 

Yes. My DRLs are disabled. I am currently researching the NCS Expert settings to allow the city (parking) lights to be my DRLs instead of the xenons. They would work particularly well since I have replaced the city light lamps with very bright LEDs that match the xenon color temperature.

I found some settings that, evidently, worked on the R56 to reassign the DRL to the city lights, but the same coding changes on the R60 don't produce the same result. Back to the drawing board...

 

i look forward to seeing how you make out, koopah. Do you need NCS Expert to disable the DRLs or can you try going through cars menus?

 

Well, it's a breeze to disable the DRLs via the "Settings" built into the personal menus (on non-Canadian MINIs). That's the easy part!

The hard part is monkeying with the parameters in the control modules to "reassign" the DRL circuit to the city lamps instead of the xenons. This requires creating the control module trace files and combing through them for potential settings changes. Fortunately, the abbreviation "TFL" seems to be a reliable string to search for in the trace files, so it's a bit of trial and error with the settings after that.