Autoblog

Vehicular lighting is a crapshoot. Some vehicles offer a great swath of even coverage from their headlamps, while others make you feel like you're squinting through welding goggles at night. I went through the trouble to retrofit one of my cars with Cibié lamps running overwattage H4 bulbs. That effort required a couple hundred dollars of parts, a good amount of labor to wire up relays and triggers, and not everyone is willing to expend such time and money, even if it means you won't overdrive your lights so easily. Sweden's Visualeyes has trotted out the Rayzer, an auxiliary lighting system that mounts from the inside and projects a beam through the windshield. We're taking the product's SEMA appearance as an indication of legality in the US. From the amount of end-user modifications we see on a daily basis, nobody's enforcing the rules on lights, anyway. The system has been patented and was developed by former race car driver Lars Svelander after a close call with a deer.

The line-of-sight position is purported to be more effective and has the benefit of leaving the outward appearance unmarred. We'd be worried about throwing light spill onto the hood, or too close to the front of the car, for that matter. Too much light in the wrong place is a detriment to night vision, but putting more lumens down the road could improve your chances of not overdoing it. The Rayzer uses a pair of HID bulbs and is wired into the car's lighting system to illuminate when the high beams are in use. There's also a fail-safe circuit that will shut the Rayzer off if oncoming vehicles are detected – a good thing when you're blasting light through your windshield. No price has been announced, but trading the hours of cutting, crimping, and snaking wires for the ease of a 15-minute installation by a non professional sounds good to us, especially if it works as well as the pictures make it appear.

Thanks for the tip, Andreas!

[Source: Visualeyes]

Mercedes has some hot-selling models in the SL, SLK and CLS, but the German automaker isn't about to sit around twiddling its thumbs. Instead they're working on facelifts for all three, poised to hit the market around this time next year.

The changes to the three models are expected to be mostly cosmetic, with little mechanical differences over the versions currently available. But of the three, the SL is tipped to get the most substantial face-lift, with insiders deriving from the spy shots that the new SL will do away with the circular headlamps in favor of the boomerang-shaped lights borrowed from the CLS.

Its little brother, meanwhile, is also getting a minor update, details of which we brought you just last week.

In advance of an anticipated onslaught from competitors entering the segment, the CLS four-door coupe is getting what appears to be a little butt-lift and a new grille borrowed from the CL coupe.

If the sources are correct and the SL adopts the headlights from the CLS, it could become a new corporate styling element across Mercedes' coupe and convertible range.

[Source: Car magazine]