Voenix Rising

Today was the front turn signals/hazard lights, completing the front end conversion. It was super easy since there was no coding required; just a matter of swapping out the bulbs and getting to them was surprisingly easy.

I’m still considering replacing the side wheel well trim lights, but those look like they’d be a bitch—especially the rear. Everyone recommends removing the wheels to ease the process, and ordinarily that wouldn’t be an issue, but this would involve buying a jack (I don’t have one since the car has run-flat tires all around), and I’m actually wondering if having that whole piece lit up would be too much bling.

It started with the sidemarkers.

Then it was the puddle lights.

A year later it was the taillights.

And yesterday it was the headlights.

Rabbit came with basic garden-variety halogen headlights. Once upon a time, shortly after they arrived on the scene, halogens were da bomb. (I remember driving either to or from Phoenix/Tucson one night and was amazed at how much brighter they were in my new Toyota Corolla SR-5 than the ancient incandescent bulbs my Chevy LUV had.)

Then, after a few vehicular mistakes in the interim, 20 years later I got Anderson, my first MINI. Anderson was a dealer demo model that came tricked out with pretty much every option available. Anderson had self-leveling xenon headlights. Their brightness was like day and night compared to the halogens I’d had in every car since the Corolla.

The xenons were great, and I swore I’d never own another car without them.

They worked fine until February 2020. The pneumatic lifts that propped up Anderson’s bonnet had lost their pressure, and I kept putting off replacing them. One day, after checking the oil or something, I forgot they weren’t working properly and after removing the wooden dowel I had propped the hood up with, the bonnet crashed down. I didn’t think anything of it until the next morning driving to work before sunrise and realized the xenons were now pointing down to a location about five feet in front of the car. (No wonder I couldn’t see anything!)

They were no longer self-leveling. Something had broken in the mechanism when the hood went down. (The headlights themselves were built into the bonnet, not the body of the car.)

When I looked into the cost of having them replaced, my heart sank. I knew this—and the extensive (and expensive) cooling issues I’d experienced over the past year—were signs as much as I was loathe to give up Anderson, the time was rapidly approaching to find a new vehicle.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I came home with Rabbit about a month later, right before the lockdown hit in 2020.

I thought I could live with the stock halogens that came with the car, but over the past couple years with my advancing age, it was becoming more and more difficult to see at night, so I’d started driving with my fogs on. (Those at least were bright white LEDs.) I’d did a bit of research into replacing the halogen bulbs with LEDs, but there were so many contradictory discussions as to the wisdom of doing such a thing it seemed it was more trouble than it was worth.

But a couple weeks ago after I replaced the taillights, I thought, “Why the fuck not?” and dove back into it. Admittedly guilty of “doing my own research,” I watched a few informative videos on YouTube, and finally decided on a pair of bulbs that looked like they’d be the best match for my car.

Unfortunately, the Cooper used in the video where these particular bulbs were installed was not the same year as mine, and the interior of the headlamp assembly was a different configuration. The bulbs I ordered and received would not fit. They were sent back.

Now undaunted, I found out what configuration was needed, and Amazon came to the rescue. It literally was plug-and-play but the post installation coding of the computer kept throwing me for a loop. No matter which voltage monitoring I turned off, the car was still throwing the headlight warning light.

I finally realized this morning that I’d missed toggling one high beam setting, and once that was done and coded, voila! no more errors.

And how do they look?

Lovely. Absolutely lovely. Just what I wanted.