ILS Intelligent Light System LHD - RHD

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PaulXC

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Am I right in thinking that the the ILS in a LHD car will work correctly in the UK just by setting it to in the vehicle - lights menu?

I took my RHD CLS with ILS to France once and I think it worked fine just by setting the option in the menu.

What I am wondering is, are the actual headlight units different in RHD to LHD cars, or are they the same units just controlled by the software in the car.

Still pondering a replacement for the S211 which ideally would be LHD. All the nice spec cars seem to be in Germany...
 
Headlights are different. When you select the wrong side for the car, it flattens the beam completely. You also have an issue with the rear fog light being on wrong side.

I.e you can not take a UK car to Germany and it pass its local registration test without changing the headlights and possibly rear foglamp

The newest W213/etc with the LED array can be persuaded to behave properly if you are moving country with a car.

Richard
 
Am I right in thinking that the the ILS in a LHD car will work correctly in the UK just by setting it to in the vehicle - lights menu?

I took my RHD CLS with ILS to France once and I think it worked fine just by setting the option in the menu.

What I am wondering is, are the actual headlight units different in RHD to LHD cars, or are they the same units just controlled by the software in the car.

Still pondering a replacement for the S211 which ideally would be LHD. All the nice spec cars seem to be in Germany...
Hi Paul, whilst there are parallels to be drawn the car I'm going to refer to is my wife's Toyota RAV4 with projector headlights.

As said her car - a 2007 model - has projector headlights which have the same 'continental driving' lever within the headlights. Her's were set to 'Continental driving' mode and yesterday passed a French Controle Technique (MOT). In the passed I have had Jaguars and Rovers all with projector lights, all had this adjuster to flatten the dipped beam and all passed the French CT.

So this leads me to conclude if you have std. projector or ILS headlights, when they are adjusted they will pass a UK MOT with a flat dipped beam.
 
The newest W213/etc with the LED array can be persuaded to behave properly if you are moving country with a car.
Do you mean they will needed to be re-coded by the dealer (rather than using the on-board menu) to work the same way when driving on the other side. i.e you still get all the functionality of ILS - rather than just flattening the beam.

So this leads me to conclude if you have std. projector or ILS headlights, when they are adjusted they will pass a UK MOT with a flat dipped beam.
I drive my LHD car about 50% of the time in mainland Europe and 50% here. My current S211 (Spanish supplied) as LHD spec headlights but is UK registered - I set the lever to flatten the beam and it passed its first 8 MOT's fine but last year I had to put some beam deflector stickers on the headlight glass to get it through.

The flat dipped beam is not ideal in rural areas either here or abroad - hence wondering whether looking for another car with ILS might give me a perfect headlight set-up regardless of which side of the road I'm driving on.
 

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