My C5 is a facelifted model and it has the HID headlights. As Citroenmad mentions above they are steerable / directional, I'm going to disagree with his description of them slightly. The dipped beams are provided by a projector style headlamp which is HID powered, it is these lamps that steer. The reason for my disagreement here is that the HID lamps have a movable shutter in them which means they also provide some of the high beam, so you have a steerable low beam and (part of) your high beam steers too. In addition to the HID lights, there is also a set of tungsten halogen high beams which do not steer, these only have about half of the light of the HID lights so roughly 2/3 of your light output is steerable.Citroenmad wrote:Some facelift C5s (Standard on exclusive and optional on VTR spec) have xenon headlights, which turn with the steering (i.e. DS style). However they only turn a very small amount and nothing like a DS, they also turn main bean not full beam. These are also on C6s too and a few other manufacturers have this on their range toppers now. Steerable headlights. Its easy to tell if they have these, as they have a round light in the headlights, as apposed to normal looking lights on the more basic facelift C5s.
I almost bought a C5 with these, i was shocked when i noticed it had them fitted and they seemed to work well. Though im not sure how much advantage they really give?
I too thought you needed headlamp washers for HID kits and self-leveling on the lights. However hydraulic Cits obviously dont need leveling lights, as the suspension keeps the car level and so the lights level too.
All normal cars have a dial or wheel of some kind, so you can set the lights down onto the road when you have weight in the back of the car. As a big citroen levels again when weight is added, this is not needed. So that is one problem solved with fitting HIDs to them. Though this wont help with a C2.
Its reasonably popular to fit them to Xms, VSX cars have headlamp washers and obviously self leveling suspension, so they are a legal fit. In theory.
Driving at night on windy roads there is some advantage to the steerable lights, however I'd like them to turn more than they do. They can't predict a corner and turn into it before you get to the corner (that would need some pretty high-end cleverness), they can only react to steering input, so when they turn, you're already in the corner.
Self leveling suspension doesn't react fast enough to cope with dips and bumps in the road or the car pitching because of acceleration or braking in the way that the self levelers on HID lights can.