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I had the fortune of having a substantially sized rock land on my right headlight while driving my MY2007 XC90 on the highway, which ended up cracking the headlight and punching a small hole in it. Since both headlights are really faded, I thought I should change both of them and perhaps refresh the look of the car a bit by fitting the projector style headlights.

My concerns are in regards to the wiring, the plugs and also whether or not the fact that my car does not come with bending lights is of any importance. Hopefully it's plug 'n' play.

Edit: I am not interested in having the bending lights feature functional as long as I retain previous functionality which, to the extent of my knowledge, means automatic leveling and the fact that the low beam reflector points upwards when full beams are switched on.

To be clear, the current headlights, even though they use reflectors, are the factory equiped, OEM HID units.

So, would the projector headlights fit?

I basically want to go from these:

enter image description here

(image source)

to these:

enter image description here

(image source)

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3 Answers 3

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+150

Yep, the Bi-Xenon projector units are plug-n-play from a connector point of view - you'd need to buy the units that come with the leveling motor and Xenon control unit as you can't swap the old ones over.

The ADL (i.e. "bendy light") functionality doesn't work if you retrofit them (you don't have the necessary control elements on the car side of the equation) but the lights default position is "straight" anyway so it won't impact anything.

Everything else should work fine for you since you already have HID lights you'll have the auto-leveling control sensors and control software already.

For a RHD car the left headlight is Valeo part# 043518 and the right is part# 043515

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  • Thanks for the info. As it's not quite obvious to me how to start a chat, I'm just going to ask here. I searched for the part numbers and found the units, with motor and all included, but I can't figure out from the images if they're physically integrated into the actual headlights or if the are separate. It doesn't make much difference in the end but just want to know what I'm getting into.
    – user1969903
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 17:41
  • FYI, selecting the green check mark means that this answered your question, which lowers the chance of any additional answers being posted. @user1969903. It's generally not a bad idea to just leave the check off for a few extra days, then come back and check it. Meanwhile, you can select the upward arrow (as you probably know) to upvote an answer, which means that you like it without telling everyone that this is THE ANSWER. Then again, if you're sure that this is the answer you want, feel free to leave it this way. Just saying it's pretty quick.
    – Cullub
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 18:27
  • To be honest, I don't expect to get another answer, but if no harm's done I will proceed as you advised.
    – user1969903
    Commented Jul 27, 2019 at 10:01
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As far as I am aware, based on the experience of my car (not a volvo, but I have owned Volvos in the past), then the necessary wiring and control modules will not be fitted to your car.

You will need to source all the necessary parts to make the directional headlights work in your car. Volvo and most car manufacturer's do not fit unused equipment due to the cost factor and also weight...

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  • I should have mentioned it in the question, but I'm not interested in making the bending lights work. If they do out of the box (unlikely, as you said) great. If not, oh well.
    – user1969903
    Commented Jul 22, 2019 at 9:59
  • It's not only the unit for directional control, but the necessary module(s) for driving the HID units as well.
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Jul 22, 2019 at 10:00
  • I thought that it would make more sense from a cost perspective to have one do-it-all module that they then just customize from software, kind of like how the same model car with the exact same engine and transmission comes from factory with different power figures which can be changed by remapping the engine. But what you say does make sense.
    – user1969903
    Commented Jul 22, 2019 at 10:06
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OP here. I replaced the stock reflector xenons with ABLs and they may or may not work depending on your car's configuration.

If you turn on the headlights by switching the switch to the 12 o'clock position: enter image description here,

the ABLs will point straight down and you get a warning in your dash. Therefore, the accepted answer is wrong, specifically

[...] but the lights default position is "straight" anyway so it won't impact anything.

However, if your car is configured so that the headlights turn on when the switch is at 0 or 9 o'clock:

enter image description here

Then the headlights turn on and they're aimed properly and you don't get any errors.

The downside to this is that you can't permanently turn on the full beam on the 0 position, you can only flash. If you switch to the 12 o'clock, as I said above, you get an error and the headlights are aimed down as low as they'll go.

If your car is configured such that the lights are off at the 0 position, well, the lights are off.

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