They're a legal requirement on HID and LED headlamps, so they have to put prepararation in anyway, so what's another couple of nozzles, pump and pipe.

They aren't very affective IMHO. naybe they would be for mud.

Edited by Hamsafar on 29/09/2013 at 20:10

Very effective if they have washers and small wipers fitted to sweep the lights, my MB has those, only as good as a rinse can be if they are simply jets without wipers and useless with dry muck splattered flies etc, difficult to see how you could have wipers on the head lights if plastic, they'd be scratched to useless in months.

had the same wipers and washers fitted to a Volvo lorry years ago, the problem is that they come on automatically every time you washed the screen if the headlights were on (same as my car) and on a mucky day you could empty the washer bottle of fluid in one day, so in practice i used to disconnect the headlamp washer pump, and without fail the mechanics would reconnect it every 6 weekly inspection.

By the way as an aside, and not wishing to divert the thread before its got going, i absolutely detest plastic headlights, give me real glass lenses any day...going to run my old MB till either i or it dies and not just for that reason.

at one time I drove a Volvo 360, with proper headlamp wash wipers ... they were effective in cleaning the headlamp glass when driving in mucky conditions, exactly the same as when using the windscreen wash wipe - it was possible to see the image of the wiper blade move across the projected light on the ground as it wiped the glass.

Nowadays I have Xenon headlamps and the washer system is a pop out spray jet that operates every 5th wash when the headlights are on. Is it effective? I'm not sure, I think so but without the outline of the wiped area to compare it's harder to tell. So much for EU requirements they say it's top prevent dirt refracting the more powerful light in strange directions, however cars outside the EU don't need the washer system.

(Actually I'd like to see washer systems fitted to all cars, like in Sweden, so many motorists drive aroudn with dirty headlamps, the dirt does reduce the headlamp effectiveness)