New Chrysler 300 - are the high beams defective?

Rented a car for a road trip over the weekend... needed to carry four people and lots of stuff for a ~500 mile trip, so any of the vehicles I own wouldn't have been appropriate, ended up with a 300. Actually didn't hate it (although it did take a while to figure out why it kept engaging the bun warmers on me every time I started the car...) UNTIL I got off the Interstate and started down a rural Michigan two lane. I hit the brights and... nothing.

After some flicking back and forth, I realized that the brights actually did slightly illuminate the trees at the side of the road better than just the lows so there were definitely two different modes going on here, but they did literally nothing to help me see farther down the road than the low beams, and there really was only a slightly perceptible difference between the two. Also the low beams stayed on so the foreground was quite well lit, which didn't seem to help matters much.

Are they *really* that bad? And having lived in Michigan previously, I would think that proper lighting for a high speed two lane at night would actually be a serious day to day consideration for the people designing these beasts, as there sure are plenty of them in MI. Or did I get a rental with defective headlights?

It's a BiHalogen setup -- a single projector with a movable cutoff shield that is pulled out of the light path to create high beam. That's why you don't see a "jump" from one beam pattern to another as you might be accustomed to in cars with separate high and low beam headlamps, or with two-filament reflector-type headlamps. The light source is the very intense HIR2 bulb. There have been some consistency-of-performance issues with the BiHalogen headlamps Chrysler has been buying from a Korean Tier-1, but I think those problems were resolved some years ago. It might have been interesting to see what the two modes looked like on a wall.

(So why were the "bun warmers" going on automatically?)

hmm, maybe the shields are only partially moving in this particular car then - that would be disappointing however as it only has 13K miles on it whereas the similar HID setup in my 335i is working fine after 90K miles.

It was a setting in the touchscreen menu... either it was delivered like that or a previous renter found it and thought it was a good idea to enable that feature. But invariably after about a minute after setting off, i'd feel that warmth in my nether region and I prefer to remain cool while driving

My Hella Bi-Xenon headlights are similar with little change from low beam to high beam. The shutter is certainly opening, but I don't get the kind of dramatic change in light like you expect from most vehicles.