Xenon light
Xenon headlights offer many advantages over halogen ones: based on noble gas, they provide a much brighter light with less energy consumption and last longer than conventional headlamps.
Xenon headlights are a high-intensity discharge light source for high or low beam, and offer a number of advantages over conventional halogen bulbs. The light is produced by an electric arc that forms between two tungsten electrodes. The very small headlamp consists of a bulb made of quartz glass, filled with xenon gas under high pressure, plus mercury and metallic salts – less than 1 mg in total.
This ionised noble gas uses less energy and has a much longer service life than conventional headlamps. To make sure that vehicles driving towards you or ahead of you are not dazzled by this stronger light, BMW xenon headlights incorporate a projection lens which directs the light beam straight to the road. In addition, automatic height adjustment aligns the headlights to suit the load the car is currently carrying. Xenon headlights provide particularly bright, intense illumination of the road, ensuring significantly greater visibility in bad weather or in the dark – an important contribution to your driving safety.
In addition to the normal xenon lights, BMW now offers xenon light for full and dipped beam headlights, also known as bi-xenon headlights. The light for the full beam headlights uses the same light source as the xenon dipped beam headlights: as soon as the driver turns the full beam on, by touching the lever on the steering column, the bi-xenon system folds away a screen located in the path of the ellipsoid-technology xenon headlight’s beam.