Headlights

[Elmo]

Could someone point me towards the RCW governing headlights and brightness. If you could explain it here that would be great too. I was looking into getting HID lights but want to know what is allowed.

Thanks

[Biggler20]

you're gonna want to check out the RCW's in section 46.37. That has all the lighting rules in it. You should be fine if all your doing is converting to HID's.

[Elmo]

you're gonna want to check out the RCW's in section 46.37. That has all the lighting rules in it. You should be fine if all your doing is converting to HID's.

There are different variants of HIDs in which some appear brighter then others and are on different light wavelengths.

I can not find any guidelines regarding brightness/wattage except for 46.37.180 which are lamps other then the primary head/(spot?) lamps. It only mentions that it should not be angled to a point where it blinds oncoming traffic. My friend is a WSHP officer and he came up with the same conclusion.



Troopers?....

[Seventy2002]

Washington Administrative Code (WAC) 204-10-020 adopts Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 108 and Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J 578 as the standards for aftermarket headlamps.

If your HID lamps meet one or both of these standards you should be good to go. Be careful though, the cheap stuff mailed direct from Hong Kong is probably non-compliant.