Lighting upgrade: DRL, fog and reverse lights

Consider these auxiliary lighting upgrades. I upgraded the DRL globes to LEDs with a colour temperature to match the factory LED headlights; I also used brighter and yellow coloured LED globes in the fog lights which differentiates the fog lights from the DRLs. Finally, I added much brighter reverse lights which is a big improvement offroad at night.

I also have a related useful video: what different light modes do what. This demonstrates the upgraded DRLs and fog lights pretty nicely.

DRL upgrade

For these I used an Osram LED: a P13W globe with a colour temperature of 6000K. Part number is 5828CW; Osram describe this as a “premium DRL LED”. I can’t seem to find it for sale now but no doubt there is something equivalent.

One thing to be aware of with these: I had to swap over the o-ring from the factory bulb housing to these LED replacements. The supplied o-ring on the Osram globes was slightly too large to fit in the housing correctly. With that done it was otherwise a straight swap over.

I don’t seem to have any pics of the install or a before/after comparison, but here’s the details on the o-ring swap.

Fog light upgrade

I apparently have zero pictures of this at all! For this I used a generic yellow LED fog light replacement. It is advertised as being H8-H9-H11-H16 compatible so presumably something that is the same would work for you.

Reverse light upgrade

This upgrade is a huge benefit to using the car, the factory reversing lights are pretty weak. Offroad this can be pretty annoying. I was anticipating putting on small additional reverse lights for use offroad but upgrading the bulbs has meant I didn’t need to.

Although there are multiple options you could go with to do this, I went with a Stedi upgrade to 1000 lumen globes for the reverse light. The reverse lights in the Jimny are a T20 wedge style globes. The Stedi ones fitted in the housing perfectly and the silicone boot around them should be water tight(ish).

To get to these installed, I found it easier to pull the bumper off. There are 3 nuts per side and a connector to undo; with the towbar in my car it was a bit annoying to get to the 3 bolts hence taking the bumper off. It’s probably not necessary to remove the bumper, though.

With that you can remove the taillight assembly out of the bumper to get access to the globes.

Unscrew the bulb housing that is to the right in this picture and you’ll extract the globe.

The globe just pulls out of this grey housing.

There is a bit of a size difference with these globes. The LED ones need to take into account the driver circuitry and also the heat sink needed.

This means the globe does not immediately go back in the original bulb holder, instead, the old bulb holder is where the tail of the LED globe plugs in, and you press the new globe into the taillight housing itself. The little tail gives you just enough room to plug wriggle the old bulb housing around and make it all fit back in the bumper nicely.

Put the taillight back into the bumper, repeat the process for the other side and then refit the bumper.

Here’s a comparison between the stock globes and the replacements to see the difference.

Much brighter!

With both done it’s a really amazing transformation as to just how much brighter it is now, especially offroad!