Replacing Ford Transit’s headlight bulb

Changing a light bulb for the Ford Transit’s headlight can first sound frightening. The van’s manuals instructs to remove the whole light element, which includes all the front facing lights. However, Ford’s engineers have made a good job on the mechanics and it is actually pretty easy to remove the element.

Ford headlight

A Phillips screwdriver is needed to open up the two screws on top of the element. These are the only screws that fix the element to the chassis. They are quite loose and thus easy to turn. There is one plug at the back of the element in the bottom corner. This plug feeds the electricity for all the lights inside the element. The plug goes into the small green connector shown in the figure. The connector needs to be unplugged.

Ford headlight

The element is now ready to be removed by pulling straight forward. Be careful not to drop it! The clear plastic front and the shape make it a bit slippery. It is very easy to replace the light bulb, since there’s nothing preventing the access to it. The bulb type is H4 in my Carado, but other types are also possible if you have a different van version.

New bulbs

I replaced the originals with Philips bulbs that promise 25% more visibility with the same rated watts. The new bulbs atleast look more bright when driving through a tunnel. I do not know if they really light up the road any better, since it is mid-summer and there’s no dark even during the night. This is a nice phenomenom in the Finnish summer. Mid-summer nights are almost bright like a day.

I will see if the Philips’ promise holds in the Autumn. The old light bulbs had seen over 29000 km / 18000 miles of road and the light output was probably decreased somewhat. So in that perspective the new bulbs should be clearly better.