Headlights. They have evolved over the years. Way back when they were made out of glass which lasted the life of the car as far as that part of it was concerned. But the filament inside would burn out or the light really wasn’t that good. Now, we have evolved into lenses and so on.

If you look at here you can see that this one is styled to match the contours of the car. And what has also happened is that the lamps inside these, well they have evolved. See we started out with incandescent then moved up to HID.

Now the current technology is LED. Well that’s great except for one thing, the lens on all of these are no longer made out of glass, it’s made out of plastic. And ultraviolet from the sun and the weathering and so on, causes this plastic to turn yellow, such as we see over here. You see the difference, one is yellowed, the other is new.

Alright, now, what can you do to restore these? Well, we’ve tried all kinds of different kits. Now if you watch late night television you will find 100 different kits out there that claim that you can make it look like brand new and it’s going to last a lifetime and all that. We haven’t found that to be true, granted, in the shop, we can make it look just like this..when it goes out the door. But six weeks to six months or so later, it comes back in looking all deteriorated again. So you can try the kit, may work, may not. You’re going to invest a few bucks and some time.

But the thing we find most times is that it tends to end up looking like this over here in a few weeks. This one was polished and now it’s all dull again. So one thing that we do in the repair shops, for a lot of popular cars, you can buy an aftermarket replacement headlight that actually sometimes costs less than paying someone to polish the headlight. So it’s a way to save money and get some durability.

And if you have a question or comment, drop me a line, right here at MotorWeek.