I Bought $1,800 Headlights For My Porsche Cayenne Because I Hate Chrome

I’m not sure I can explain my anti-chrome obsession to anyone who doesn’t get it. I am repelled, repulsed, and sickened by the shiny mirror-like finish that so many automakers love to apply to vehicles. I often find myself in fear of losing my lunch when I even think about it, especially when it’s a chrome-like finish added to a plastic piece of trim instead of the barely-acceptable chromium-plated steel of a 1960s American automobile. I saw a Corvette with chrome wheels recently and I thought I was going to pass out. It’s a bad finish, and I think it should be wiped off the face of the planet. But if I can’t accomplish that, I can at least wipe it off the face of my car.

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Previous projects I have committed to my 2013 Cayenne Diesel tow pig included ditching the chrome factory model name emblems for gloss black, and ditching the aged Porsche badge for a new one painted black. I think both of these modifications were enhanced by the fact that the black-painted car was optioned with gloss black window trim and a fairly deep tint. It’s a dark car, and while I prefer colorful cars, I was determined to lean all the way in. The original chrome-housing headlamps, foglights, and daytime running lights looked totally out of place, so I went looking for a solution.

The foglights I dealt with a few months ago. I found a set of Morimoto-assembled LED upgrade lights from Porsche parts house Rennline. At $205 for the pair, they aren’t inexpensive for their size, but they work well and look good. Sometimes beauty is pain.

Image: Bradley Brownell

That little bit of surgery was significantly more of a pain in the ass than the headlight swap, being that I had to go in from behind the bumper to remove the torx-bit screws keeping the diminutive lower-bumper lights in, and needed to circumvent the intercooler on the passenger’s side to do it. It took lots of fine motor skill to get the old ones removed and the new ones reinstalled, but they look good, and I ordered the optional light output in yellow, so they’re even more effective in the fog.

Image: Bradley Brownell

After a friend mentioned that he’d had his Boxster headlights re-done by a company called Lightwerkz, I looked them up to see what they offered for the Cayenne, and to my delight, there was a light that fit the bill. Not only did I see an entire plug-and-play aftermarket unit with black housings, but the innards had been updated to Porsche’s current Matrix LED-style headlamp with the now-ubiquitous four-dot light pattern pioneered by the 918 Spyder hypercar.

I mulled the idea for the better part of a month, looking at dozens of reviews and talking to other Cayenne owners who had installed these lights, before finally pulling the trigger and placing my order in mid-February. To my delight, just shy of a month later, the lights arrived to my door and I could get them installed.

Image: Bradley Brownell

Lightwerkz has an install video on their website which shows the light signature before and after, as well as the improved light readings. It definitely occurred to me that they could have beefed up the results, or optimized the reading in some way to be misleading, but I decided to take the risk and as it turns out, the review seems to be pretty spot on.

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Thankfully Porsche has made headlight removal very easy. Maybe too easy. The hardest part of this job was finding out that the previous owner didn’t put the headlight removal tool back in the tool kit, and my 8mm allen key was nowhere to be found, so I had to run to Home Depot to buy one. After that, the lights were out in about ten seconds. A further five minutes or so, and the lights were unboxed and installed into the face of the car.

Image: Bradley Brownell

There’s something unnerving about a car with its headlights out. Like an eyesocket bereft of its ball.

Image: Bradley Brownell

Here you can see the new headlights and foglights installed. Even covered in salt, the Cayenne is looking a bit more ready to rumble.

I wasn’t able to find anything to replace the factory DRLs, and that would require removing the bumper anyway, which I’m not particularly inclined to do right now. As luck would have it, I had a roll of yellow vinyl laying around, so I broke that out, applied it to the DRLs, and stepped back to admire my work.

Image: Bradley Brownell

You can see here what the running lights look like without the main beam on.

Image: Bradley Brownell

In practice, because I live in the city, there’s not much functional difference between what I can and cannot see. At night everything is lit up with street lamps anyway. I took a drive to the boondocks this morning to see how they worked and while it would have been tough to get a back-to-back impression, they seem to be brighter and illuminate farther down the road without blinding other drivers. I’m happy with the swap.