Hey all, I bought myself a 2012 Nissan Maxima SV last month. 27k miles, although I've already gotten it over 30! Came from a 2008 Chevrolet Malibu LTZ 3.6 which I loved, until it developed leaks and some other issues. Test drove my Maxima and was done. Black on black leather with red stitching. Love it.

Pretty much gotten it figured out front to rear, but I do have a question about the headlights. One of my requirements for shopping was that my new car must have HID headlights...I've done a number of retrofits and just wanted a car that had them out of the box. Which this one did, I noticed on the lot.

Only thing is, to my knowledge my car is just a no-frills SV, no tech, sport, premium or any other packages that I'm aware of. And I thought I read somewhere that the HID headlights were only available on the SV with one of those packages. But yet they're definitely up there.

I was wondering if there was a way to tell if they were factory HID lights without having to disassemble anything...such as RPO codes or labels that might be under the hood somewhere. I'm wanting to get new D2S bulbs because mine look like they've been in there for a while...they've gotten a little dimmer and colorshifted a bit as HID bulbs do when they're older. The cutoff is absolutely perfect though, it doesn't look like an HID bulb in a halogen projector.

Thanks for your responses!

 

Easiest way is to look at the igniter mounted to the bulb and see if it looks like a silver Matsu****a igniter:

 

One of the easier ways to tell is to open your hood, and try to look at the back of the headlight, if you can see the wires coming from the plug connected to the bulb, then it's halogen; if you can't and there's just a cap covering the back of the headlight, then you have HID.

Also, apparently the cars that have stock HIDs have some kind of yellow high voltage sticker near the top of the headlights under the hood, about the size of a business card. Seen a picture of it before, but can find it now.

The sure fire way to know is once it gets darker, turn on your lights, if they go dim for a few seconds and get brighter over the course of a minute or so, then you have HIDs.

 

Halogen

 

I do have the high voltage sticker, I found. Also went ahead and got down to the actual headlight itself, and sure enough it's got D2S bulbs in it rather than an H11 HID replacement (and the silver caps of course). Not sure how that worked because I was under the impression that HIDs weren't available on the SV without one of the option packages, but it's in there. Maybe it was dealer installed.

Thanks for the help!