So, I finally imported a set of EDM headlights. No, they're not from England but from Germany. These are among the rarest of all 3rd gen Protege headlights worldwide, aside from the JDM only HID headlights. I don't have the sales numbers of the 2003 EDM P5s which came with these headlights, but my guess is they're in the low thousands to mid thousands at the very most-- which is still quite a bit more than the 2002.5 to 2003.5 JDM Sport20s. Whether it was in Europe or Japan, the sales numbers were fairly low because these were top spec cars with the big "thirsty" engines which most buyers weren't looking for because gas is so much more expensive over there. I believe there are far more RHD versions of these headlights because the UKDM P5s seemed had been more popular 20 years ago than in continental Europe.
These are the considered the pinnacle of safe to use headlights for American roads, albeit illegally because they don't meet DOT specs. These did come stock on 2003 EDM P5s only (just like in Canada and Japan), but the 2001 and 2002 came with all chrome housings that look just like our USDM P5 ones. The fact that these have the black housings is and that they're from EDM LHD P5s what makes the rare and special. If I didn't live here in the US but in Japan, Australia, UK, etc, it would've been better to use the JDM OEM HID headlights instead. But JDM headlights have the beam pattern that goes the wrong way, which not only dangerously blinds oncoming drivers but makes them dangerously useless for your side of the road where you're driving since there's less light thrown towards the right side of the road.
What also makes the EDM headlights unique, just like the JDM HID headlights are the leveling motors mounted on them. They are controlled by a dial in the dashboard, just like what the early Mazda3s and 6s with HIDs had in the US. Because European regulators are always overly concerned about headlight glare, these have been required in Europe for about 30 years, and even longer in more stringent countries like Germany. Ideally these days, automatic leveling using an electronic controller with a suspension mounted ride height sensor is the best because that effectively eliminates any margin of error. There are aftermarket solutions out there, such as one from Hella, but it's a lot of effort to get it all to work. Where leveling motors are required, the idea is so that if you have your trunk loaded full of beer for example, the sagging rear end would make the headlights shoot light into the air rather than down to the road, which easily blinds others but selfishly light up the road very very far ahead. Late model pickup trucks these days have the leveling switches but ignorant drivers fail to use them when they're carrying loads and brodozers don't even bother reaiming their headlights downwards at all.
With all that said, why go through the trouble and expense (they cost as much as a clapped out Protege) getting these headlights instead of just the Canadian P5 ones? Because the lazy soft cut off in the P5 beam pattern sucks. I never liked it since the day the P5 came out and with the same amount of aiming, they never project light as far as these EDM 323F headlights with a far superior cut off and up sweep beam pattern which the regular 01-03 Proteges also have-- a typical European/rest of world headlight beam pattern that lights up the road side and signs well.
And so much do I hate the P5's headlight beam pattern, I'd been advocating for years the superiority of the sedan's headlight beam pattern. But times, technology, and knowledge have changed. I was happy with my stock headlights running the illegal (now discontinued) Osram Hyper H4s, which are 10 watts over normal, for the longest time, until I upgraded my daily beater Corolla's headlights with TWDM ones 6 years ago and installed HIR1 and HIR2 bulbs in them while I was at it. Despite the fact that they're halogen bulbs, I was blown away by its near HID performance (what the HIR bulbs was set out to accomplish in design). I desperately tried to find if there were even better H4 light bulbs out there without causing a thermonuclear melt down in the plastic headlights and wiring. There aren't really. Some slight improvements over the Osram Hypers (hence why they got discontinued), but not much. That leaves me with having to spend a fortune importing the EDM 323F (aka EDM P5) headlights and putting up with hard to replace, often blown H7 light bulbs.
Even before I finally decided to buy these headlights, I was so hesitant in doing so until getting back in touch with lighting guru Daniel Stern in the past couple of years and I was able to make my decision after asking him about the German quasi-legal LED retrofit kits sold by Osram and Philips, since LED light bulbs have much longer lifespans than halogen bulbs. Long life of LED light bulbs makes use/ownership of these headlights pretty much hassle free (long life halogen H7 bulbs still burn out quickly). He was able to advise that Osram and Philips was able to produce a high enough quality LED bulb that was able to barely meet the stringent TUV tests in Germany for some cars. Of those cars, only those are considered legal to use with these LED retrofit kits and both manufacturers publish a list stating which cars are approved for legal use. Most Mazdas fail to make that list unfortunately, so it's either because they failed the tests or Philips or Osram didn't bother getting them tested at all because of the cost/effort involved.
Seeing as I hardly drive my Protege any more and is now essentially a "Sunday car", I figured it was worth taking a risk with the retrofit and at its worse I can just stick to long life halogen bulbs which still outperform brighter H4 bulbs. He recommended me the recently introduced Philips Ultinon Pro6000 over their Pro9000 and Osram's Nightbreaker LEDs because of better light distribution/geometrics. And so, here we now are with these EDM 323F headlights, which I managed to get a couple of years ago (appears to be old stock made in 2007/2008, based on the lot numbers), and me doing something that I always been telling people not to do: don't install HID or LED retrofits because they're unsafe and illegal. I'm officially a hypocrite!
The downside is, there is some potential loss of high beam performance because these uses H1 light bulbs instead of the HB3 light bulbs used in the P5 headlights and JDM HID headlights. With any HB3 headlight, they can easily accept much improved/brighter/cooler HIR1 light bulbs. The saving grace is a well designed reflector that lets a high performance "+120" H1 light bulb make up for any functional losses because they seem (at quick glance, real test still to be done) to outperform my daily beater Corolla's TWDM headlight's high beams which have Vosla HIR1 light bulbs installed.
Finally, the classic 01-03 Protege's night time lighting silhouette is gone with these headlights. They do not use the turn signal bulbs for the parking lights. This is in fact illegal in many countries as the color amber is strictly dedicated to turn signals and side markers only. Instead, a separate parking light bulb is installed in the top corner of the high beam reflectors. The spot for this is actually there on P5 headlights, but is just a flat round spot that hasn't been drilled out. This discrete parking light bulb produces white light and makes the headlight produce a faint glow as if the headlight is being dimmed. In the Anglo speaking countries outside of North America, they're commonly referred to as "city lights", but for all intents and purposes they are still parking lights and are very much legal in the US as DOT regulations allow white parking lights. Some USDM cars do have them (such as some mid 90s Jaguars and Bimmers) rather than amber lights, as a matter of fact. To me, having all white light gives the car a cleaner look when looking at it from the front, and the separate bulbs takes away any ambiguity and visibility issues of the turn signals. No more "dim-bright-dim-bright" that might be hard to determine if the turn signals are flashing in some conditions!
TLDR:
These are the considered the pinnacle of safe to use headlights for American roads, albeit illegally because they don't meet DOT specs. These did come stock on 2003 EDM P5s only (just like in Canada and Japan), but the 2001 and 2002 came with all chrome housings that look just like our USDM P5 ones. The fact that these have the black housings is and that they're from EDM LHD P5s what makes the rare and special. If I didn't live here in the US but in Japan, Australia, UK, etc, it would've been better to use the JDM OEM HID headlights instead. But JDM headlights have the beam pattern that goes the wrong way, which not only dangerously blinds oncoming drivers but makes them dangerously useless for your side of the road where you're driving since there's less light thrown towards the right side of the road.
What also makes the EDM headlights unique, just like the JDM HID headlights are the leveling motors mounted on them. They are controlled by a dial in the dashboard, just like what the early Mazda3s and 6s with HIDs had in the US. Because European regulators are always overly concerned about headlight glare, these have been required in Europe for about 30 years, and even longer in more stringent countries like Germany. Ideally these days, automatic leveling using an electronic controller with a suspension mounted ride height sensor is the best because that effectively eliminates any margin of error. There are aftermarket solutions out there, such as one from Hella, but it's a lot of effort to get it all to work. Where leveling motors are required, the idea is so that if you have your trunk loaded full of beer for example, the sagging rear end would make the headlights shoot light into the air rather than down to the road, which easily blinds others but selfishly light up the road very very far ahead. Late model pickup trucks these days have the leveling switches but ignorant drivers fail to use them when they're carrying loads and brodozers don't even bother reaiming their headlights downwards at all.
With all that said, why go through the trouble and expense (they cost as much as a clapped out Protege) getting these headlights instead of just the Canadian P5 ones? Because the lazy soft cut off in the P5 beam pattern sucks. I never liked it since the day the P5 came out and with the same amount of aiming, they never project light as far as these EDM 323F headlights with a far superior cut off and up sweep beam pattern which the regular 01-03 Proteges also have-- a typical European/rest of world headlight beam pattern that lights up the road side and signs well.
And so much do I hate the P5's headlight beam pattern, I'd been advocating for years the superiority of the sedan's headlight beam pattern. But times, technology, and knowledge have changed. I was happy with my stock headlights running the illegal (now discontinued) Osram Hyper H4s, which are 10 watts over normal, for the longest time, until I upgraded my daily beater Corolla's headlights with TWDM ones 6 years ago and installed HIR1 and HIR2 bulbs in them while I was at it. Despite the fact that they're halogen bulbs, I was blown away by its near HID performance (what the HIR bulbs was set out to accomplish in design). I desperately tried to find if there were even better H4 light bulbs out there without causing a thermonuclear melt down in the plastic headlights and wiring. There aren't really. Some slight improvements over the Osram Hypers (hence why they got discontinued), but not much. That leaves me with having to spend a fortune importing the EDM 323F (aka EDM P5) headlights and putting up with hard to replace, often blown H7 light bulbs.
Even before I finally decided to buy these headlights, I was so hesitant in doing so until getting back in touch with lighting guru Daniel Stern in the past couple of years and I was able to make my decision after asking him about the German quasi-legal LED retrofit kits sold by Osram and Philips, since LED light bulbs have much longer lifespans than halogen bulbs. Long life of LED light bulbs makes use/ownership of these headlights pretty much hassle free (long life halogen H7 bulbs still burn out quickly). He was able to advise that Osram and Philips was able to produce a high enough quality LED bulb that was able to barely meet the stringent TUV tests in Germany for some cars. Of those cars, only those are considered legal to use with these LED retrofit kits and both manufacturers publish a list stating which cars are approved for legal use. Most Mazdas fail to make that list unfortunately, so it's either because they failed the tests or Philips or Osram didn't bother getting them tested at all because of the cost/effort involved.
Seeing as I hardly drive my Protege any more and is now essentially a "Sunday car", I figured it was worth taking a risk with the retrofit and at its worse I can just stick to long life halogen bulbs which still outperform brighter H4 bulbs. He recommended me the recently introduced Philips Ultinon Pro6000 over their Pro9000 and Osram's Nightbreaker LEDs because of better light distribution/geometrics. And so, here we now are with these EDM 323F headlights, which I managed to get a couple of years ago (appears to be old stock made in 2007/2008, based on the lot numbers), and me doing something that I always been telling people not to do: don't install HID or LED retrofits because they're unsafe and illegal. I'm officially a hypocrite!
The downside is, there is some potential loss of high beam performance because these uses H1 light bulbs instead of the HB3 light bulbs used in the P5 headlights and JDM HID headlights. With any HB3 headlight, they can easily accept much improved/brighter/cooler HIR1 light bulbs. The saving grace is a well designed reflector that lets a high performance "+120" H1 light bulb make up for any functional losses because they seem (at quick glance, real test still to be done) to outperform my daily beater Corolla's TWDM headlight's high beams which have Vosla HIR1 light bulbs installed.
Finally, the classic 01-03 Protege's night time lighting silhouette is gone with these headlights. They do not use the turn signal bulbs for the parking lights. This is in fact illegal in many countries as the color amber is strictly dedicated to turn signals and side markers only. Instead, a separate parking light bulb is installed in the top corner of the high beam reflectors. The spot for this is actually there on P5 headlights, but is just a flat round spot that hasn't been drilled out. This discrete parking light bulb produces white light and makes the headlight produce a faint glow as if the headlight is being dimmed. In the Anglo speaking countries outside of North America, they're commonly referred to as "city lights", but for all intents and purposes they are still parking lights and are very much legal in the US as DOT regulations allow white parking lights. Some USDM cars do have them (such as some mid 90s Jaguars and Bimmers) rather than amber lights, as a matter of fact. To me, having all white light gives the car a cleaner look when looking at it from the front, and the separate bulbs takes away any ambiguity and visibility issues of the turn signals. No more "dim-bright-dim-bright" that might be hard to determine if the turn signals are flashing in some conditions!
TLDR:
- I bought EDM LHD headlights from Germany
- The black housing versions are very rare and expensive.
- They produce a much better low beam pattern than P5 headlights
- I wanted much better performance than what the sedan H4 headlights could muster but didn't want to deal with changing the hard to change H7 light bulbs often, so I stuck to the sedan headlights for years
- German quasi-legal LED retrofit kits came to the market in recent years and this high quality and potentially safe option let me jump the gun to getting these higher performance P5 style EDM headlights and trying those LED retrofit kits despite no legal approvals since LED bulbs have much longer lifespans than halogen bulbs.
- The P5 high beams are potentially better with the newer HB3 bulb design rather than H1, and HB3 headlights can be upgraded with HIR1 with some slight mods to the bulb
- They have a separate parking light installed in the corner of the high beam reflectors rather than using the turn signal bulbs.
- I don't like how projectors look aesthetically in halogen headlight housings
- Most projectors commonly used today produce a DOT beam pattern which I don't like, and good ones that produce an ECE beam pattern are rare and expensive
- Finding halfway decent P5 headlight housings as donors to retrofit are pretty impossible these days, and you end up having to refurbish the lenses to make them look right, but they don't last long
- I don't like using the turn signals as the parking light also, and while this can be solved during a retrofit, that doesn't solve the problem of lack of leveling motors which is a great safety feature to have with much brighter headlights
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