Eagle Eye individual DRL's. Is there a reliable brand/make ?

[Brian Lacey]

I had fitted the four eagle eye individual DRL's to make the car a little different.
Only manufacturers all seem to be Chinese, even via UK sellers. Two of them are already failing so I wondered if anyone knew of a UK - EU - USA manufacturer of them as they might be a more reliable unit than the Chinese ones ?
Thanks
Brian.

[Matt Cup]

Be careful that the Chinese crap you have installed doesn’t set your car on fire.

Personally I’d just rip them out and bin em and leave the standard DRL’s to do their job.

[s94wht]

Different != good

[vikingaero]

All the major car electrical suppliers make car DRLs - Hella, Ring, Osram, Phillips etc.

[Brian Lacey]

Thanks.
I had them fitted because the oem DRL are low down and give a diffused light, not a bright led type. Having lights higher up improves the visibility of the car in my opinion.
Only other option I found was the blocks of three leds together but fitment was very tight.
Cheers
Brian.

[SteBrown91]

It just looks like you are a walt pretending to be a police officer.

I'd just bin them. Theres no national scandal about the poor visibilty of T-ROCs causing people to die in their thousands. The Standard DRLs meet the european standard.

[Brian Lacey]

Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by

"It just looks like you are a walt pretending to be a police officer. "

I'm just an ordinary person trying to find further information and using the knowledge of PistonHeads to do this, is this wrong ?

Cheers
Brian.

[cobra kid]

Why not go for a flashing beacon on the roof??

[LunarOne]

Brian Lacey said:

Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by

"It just looks like you are a walt pretending to be a police officer. "

I'm just an ordinary person trying to find further information and using the knowledge of PistonHeads to do this, is this wrong ?

Cheers
Brian.

You may not be aware that PH jumps on any Walty behaviour. Walt refers to Walter Mitty - someone with delusions of grandeur or importance. There are plenty of these types around and doubtless you've seen them. Many of them like to imagine that they are somehow more useful to society than the average person and try to portray themselves as some sort of security "unit" or emergency service. You know the type. They drive jacked-up 4x4s with CB antennas, reflective markings, and crucially, aftermarket lighting (strobe or otherwise) conspicuously located so that they look like police/ambulance/fire.

Basically, aftermarket lighting of this type generally looks crap and will mark you out as a Walt. The only way to avoid this is to use illegal colours, and then you'll look like a chav instead. My advice is to remove them and forget all about it. But if you must, a quality UK-based supplier of this kind of lighting is https://www.lazerlamps.com

[LivLL]

Brian Lacey said:

Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean by

"It just looks like you are a walt pretending to be a police officer. "

I'm just an ordinary person trying to find further information and using the knowledge of PistonHeads to do this, is this wrong ?

Cheers
Brian.

Just ignore it Brian, folks have been putting lights on their cars for decades nothing wrong with it. Can't offer any help on finding good ones though as the Hella site doesn't seem to sell direct to consumer.

You could look to see if a later VW has something that would be suitable, most of them now seem to have a grille LED strip that would maybe fit?

[Muddle238]

Brian,

I suspect that these Eagle Eye lights are a niche market, when it comes to cheap, niche electronics, unfortunately China trample over everyone else. As a result, nobody else particularly bothers as they can't compete against China, end result is that they'll all be cheap Chinese units, regardless of where they're sold in the world.

China manufacturing seems to have the mantra of "why build quality when you can build cheap? When it fails, it's cheap to replace" as opposed to building things to a high enough standard not to need replacement in the first place.

So your options are either just buy a batch of replacements and accept you'll have to swap out faulty units every so often, or rip the whole lot out and just rely on the OEM DRL.

I used some amber Eagle Eye lights a few years ago for some side markers on a trailer, even with infrequent use, eventually the LEDs failed. Used some in another application and again, after a while they failed too. They're made to function when new but they're not made to last.