The point I was trying to make is that there are legal HIDs being sold on new cars and they have been on new cars since at least 2004 (Cadillac Escalade low beams).
Since the early-mid 1990s, actually.
Vendor did not claim any approval or legality for my truck lights, and that was not a factor in my buying decision.
It should have been. It matters.
Since there are compliant HIDs being sold on new cars, one could reasonably reach the conclusion that not all HIDs are ineffective or unsafe simply because they are HIDs.
Er...no, not at all. There are compliant/safe and noncompliant/unsafe lamps of any/every type you might want to name, including HIDs. The existence of compliant/safe HIDs doesn't mean all HIDs are compliant/safe. The ones on your truck, as you've described them, are neither compliant nor safe. You say they "work for you", but what that attitude leaves out of the equation is that vehicle lights are interactive/public life safety equipment. The way they work affects the safety of not only yourself, but everyone else in proximity on the roads you drive. That's why whether a headlamp's design, construction, and performance is OK or not is a matter of public regulation rather than private opinion.
Best factory headlights I have ever owned were on a 1988 Jaguar XJ6 with quad sealed beams. Don't know why those were so good
They were adequate, and you liked them, but they weren't objectively very good. This is an excellent illustration of the problem with declaring headlamps good or bad based on how well you feel you can see with them when you drive at night. That might seem like a no-BS, common-sense, real-world metric, but it's actually the furthest thing from that. Our visual system is a very unreliable judge of its own performance. Human beings are not equipped to assess how well we can/can't see. Our subjective impressions on the matter are most often completely out of line with the objective, measurable reality of how well we can (or can't) see. It's not that we're deluded or fooling ourselves or telling ourselves lies or anything like that, it's that how well we feel we can see just doesn't match up with how well we really can see.
Would like to hear your take on how the HIDs in the Dodge are unsafe in very real ways that I am not considering. I have considered the glare factor and I believe I have dealt with that.
But you haven't. It can't be dealt with short of removing the 55w ballasts (and probable non-legitimate bulbs) and installing 35w ballasts and legitimate bulbs. For the moment let's ignore the substantial, real, and frequent problems with projector retrofits even if the projectors, bulbs, and ballasts are 100% legitimate parts (which they often are not). A D2S (or "D2S-like") bulb connected to a 55w ballast produces around 5,000 lumens. That's 56% more light than an automotive headlamp projector was designed to distribute, which means all intensity values are correspondingly 56% higher. Let's assume the projector has a sharp-cutoff low beam pattern with very low glare light levels above the cutoff, low enough that even if we increase them 56% we're still below the legal and technical acceptable maximum values. Fine, but we've also got 56% higher intensity
below the cutoff, and other drivers are going to get
zapped with dangerously high-intensity glare whenever their eye or mirror height happens to be below the cutoff. With the headlamp height on a truck such as you describe, that's going to happen very frequently. Common internet "wisdom" has you aiming the lamps downward to reduce this effect. That will indeed reduce the number of drivers exposed to your unsafe levels of glare (though God help the guy stuck in front of you in traffic) but it's also going to shorten your seeing distance to a level incompatible with ordinary road speeds. The seeing distance given by any particular aim angle can easily be determined with trigonometry. Small increases in the downward angle take very large bites out of your seeing distance.
But wait! There's more! The foreground illumination is also 56% brighter, and that has a triple-whammy effect on safety. The intensely-lit foreground causes your eyes' irises to constrict the same as they do in response to any bright light, which causes your distance visual ability to absolutely nosedive. The brighter the foreground, the less you can see beyond the foreground -- literally "blinded by the light". This is aggravated (the second whammy) by the unfortunate response of the human visual system to a brightly-lit foreground: our gaze is drawn to it, no matter how we might consciously strive to look down the road. So not only are we not looking where we need to be looking for safety, but the gravitation of our gaze toward the brightly-lit foreground further reduces our dark-adaptation (constricts our pupils), exacerbating the first whammy.
At the same time (third whammy), the brighter the foreground, the "better" the headlamps' performance seems/feels to us. This is really insidious; it means simultaneously we think we have superior seeing and we actually have inferior seeing. It's because by a very large margin, the top determinant of a driver's subjective ratings of how good their headlamps are is foreground light, but foreground light is an almost vanishingly minor factor in a headlamp's actual safety performance. Of course you need
some foreground light for lane maintenance and comfort/confidence, but only very little is needed. Many HID headlamps, even with standard 35w bulbs and ballasts, already produce much more foreground light than is needed or optimal; increasing it with a 55w bulb means the safety performance of the headlamp is objectively quite a lot worse.
These are some(!) of the reasons why our own subjective impressions (and internet "reviews") of a headlamp setup really are useless (or worse than useless), and they'd still be useless-at-best even if we disregard the bogus criteria often used in such "reviews" (shape and/or sharpness of cutoff, European vs US specs, etc.)
Would also appreciate your suggestions for other ways to improve the headlight performance in that truck (the Dodge).
I'd probably start with legitimate-maker 35w ballasts and
these bulbs, but what else really depends how much of a bill of goods you were sold. Many/most projector retrofits aren't safe for
reasons most retrofitters and buyers don't consider, but there
are projector retrofits that are reasonably safe and effective despite not being legally compliant because they haven't been tested or certified. Aside from the issues in the "reasons" link in this paragraph, the projectors themselves are a frequent problem area. The aftermarket ones -- Morimoto, for example, and the ones designed as knockoffs of various OE projectors -- are all (yes, all) unsafe trash.
You may note that I said the U.S. specs were "marginally inadequate," not that they are or were uniquely or especially bad. U.S and European specs have differed over time, and I would give the edge in lighting performance to the Europeans
Depends on exactly what we mean to criticize or appreciate. The European lighting standards don't (and never have) required better performance than the US standards or vice versa, it's just that the aspects of superiority and inferiority differ between the two regs, which means the ways in which a European-spec light tends to be better or worse than its US-spec counterpart differ accordingly. In some cases (but by no means all cases), European makers have tended to put higher-performing lights on their European-spec vehicles than on their US-spec vehicles, and it's definitely true that until recently there was almost exclusive European-brand (and then European/Asian-brand leadership in lighting technology in the US market -- availability of Xenon headlamps, adaptive/steering headlamps, etc.
True, but that shouldn't preclude a bit of experimentation
H9 bulbs in the low beams of your Tundra: an unsafe modification for solid reasons that have already been explained. No experiment needed or valuable.
Would still appreciate your recommendations on replacement fog lamps for the Tundra
There is no direct-fit, plug/play fog lamp, other than an OE Toyota item, that is worth going with. Any upgrade from the factory fogs would be an external/custom-mount job, which you say you don't want, so...it's going to be factory fogs!
I did read the tech threads you referenced earlier, and a lot of it seemed intuitively correct, but the most significant conclusion for me was that there is not a lot of consensus, even among those who seem to have some expertise.
But there is, on some of the important basic facts you don't seem to want to accept.
(By the way, ref. the title of this thread: wattage is not a measure of light.)
