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I was reading a discussion about different HID lamps and I was wondering why would you use HID lamps in the first place?
Is it for fuel/energy efficiency?
Is it for their higher brightness?
Color of light?

They cost quit a bit!

EDIT: To make it clear, I don't see why one would spend that much money to replace their headlights with HID lights. I want to know what people usually want to achieve when they do this. Do they want to have brighter more focused lights? or they want to conserve fuel/energy and improve their MPG? or they just want to be cool?
In my opinion this is not an open ended discussion.

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  • Welcome to the site. Do you have a specific question about a particular application? At present, this sounds like an open-ended discussion topic that fits squarely under this FAQ topic: mechanics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask Perhaps some additional content to keep this from sounding so open-ended would be in order?
    – Bob Cross ♦
    May 16, 2012 at 17:50

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From Wikipedia:

High-intensity discharge (HID) lamps make more visible light per unit of electric power consumed than fluorescent and incandescent lamps since a greater proportion of their radiation is visible light in contrast to heat.

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    They also tend to have a much sharper cutoff, with less light wasted on place you don't need it.
    – Brian Knoblauch
    May 16, 2012 at 19:33
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    @Brian we could make this whole post a wiki to capture this sort of info.
    – Bob Cross ♦
    May 16, 2012 at 21:15
  • Theoretically they should last longer as well. On my car they are expected to never need replacing during the car's lifespan.
    – Rory Alsop
    May 17, 2012 at 19:26

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