meem

busy cleaning up my dad's s4 today (father's day, y'know). headlights are all misaligned -- where are the adjustors?

thanks!

villainS4

can't remember which way goes up vs. down, but you can figure it out from there.

maceo

I just had the dealer fix mine after I 'd tried to adjust them (I was tired of overdriving them at 50).

donp

.<ul><li><a href="http://ross-tech.com/vag-com/cars/xenonalignment.html">alignment procedure</a></li></ul>

Milpitas2.7T

lot shining your lights on a building. So Mr officer stops by, asks what your doing, you tell him then they write you a ticket for non OEM lights.

Hypothetical, my lights are maladjusted

meem

because i found some plastic screws that enable me to coarsely adjust the height. what are these for if the "you can't adjust them"?

meem

adjustment too, though. is there one, short of vag-com?

thisisCP

I'm not sure if you need a VAG to adjust the horizontal. I would think you wouldn't because you need the VAG to turn off the auto-level motor, which only adjusts the vertical.

donp

The system monitors the relative postion of the headlights. If you adjust the lights without putting them in adapt mode your changes will be "adjusted out" by the leveling system.

When you put them in adapt mode and manually adjust the system then "learns" the default alignment and will keep the lights adjusted as fuel and vehicle load change.

No More B5 S4

There are really only two things your Father should be concerned with:

1) Adjusting the HIDs so your Father can see OPTIMALLY at night.

2) In addition, adjusting the HIDs so you don't blind oncoming traffic.

And that, no computer, no technical data, no specifications, etc... can tell you. All that may be a good baseline but only the person driving can tell (at least from the inside) you what is the ideal adjustment.

With respect to left/right, don't touch. It's correct from the factory. If not, ideally, then it should be reset with a VAG.

With respect to the height, from the factory, I have seen just about every A4/S4/A6/All Road about 3-5 degrees too low; that is, the beam pattern is low and only lights up about 25' in front of the car. That's OK for city driving but on the highway, you really need closer to 35'-40' of illumination.

This ~10' of extra illumination could be the difference between hitting/avoiding something.

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With that said, you want the maximum distance your HIDs can illuminate without blinding oncoming traffic.
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The way I do this is take two cars (S4 and another car) or if you don't have two cars handy some reflective object, a trash can or anything you can spot at night.

Now go to a place that's completely dark or as dark as possible. Using the other car/objective, mark off 30'. Turn on your HIDs and see how far they light up the road and see if you can illuminate the car/object. If the very edge of the beam can illuminate the car/object that's good.

As you know, the S4 has a beam pattern with a sharp cut-off and it's stepped like this:

<img src="http://images1.fotki.com/v9/photos/4/43321/151422/1Garage20feet-vi.jpg" border="0">

You want to focus on the lower cut-off.

Now get into the car (if object: simulate height as if you are sitting in a car) that's being illuminated and see if the headlights are blinding you. If not, great. You maybe able to raise them a bit. If so, you need to lower the lights. If you feel it's fine, then you're done.

If you are not blinding anyone and want max distance, simmmply-I mean simply move your S4 back in 5' increments. And retest. I'd say the realistic limit is going to be about 40'-45' of illumination before you start to irritate oncoming traffic. YMMV.

I'd say in general, if you're on the edge, be conservative about 5'. Go 5' less, lower.

Remember, no one can tell you what you can and cannot see. It's impossible. Only you can. So to ideally, you need to adjust your headlights. :-)


One day sooner than later, I re-write this up, use detailed pictures and archive it some where for reference.