Replacing the faded lights on my Porsche 911: Purchase & DIY install

I came across LED aftermarket lights with 992 styling. They look great and are made by a fairly reputed aftermarket light company called Morimoto. $1800 for a pair.

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At the time of buying this 911, I was in two minds about whether to buy a 997 or a 991. Even though the 991 is more expensive, it has much better quality and materials. 991 cars in the market were also in much better condition (some in almost showroom condition) with very little wear and tear. On the other hand, 997 choices were very limited. The quality of materials was one step lower and a lot of bits with dated designs.

The dated look doesn’t bother me much, it’s just a preference for a classic/legacy look. The difficult pill to swallow was the below-average cosmetic condition of the car. You know, it’s very hard to find an owner who manages to keep a car in great condition for 10 long years. The thing that irritated me the most was the condition of the lights – somebody ran a polisher on the lights. Grrrr… And the lights also have a faded look. They still look just fine as you can see from the pics.

Only upon close examination at some specific angles, you will see this.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Getting back to the 997 vs 991 dilemma, I am very happy with my decision to go with 997. With the introduction of gorgeous 992, it has become evident that 991 was a work-in-progress design. This is a subjective opinion, but I feel 993, 997, and 992 look more appealing than 996 and 991 (especially pre-facelift which was in my shortlist).

After owning the 997 for a few years and seeing the overall landscape of current and future cars, I am convinced that I should hold on to this 997 as long as the government allows it on the road.

That’s the long backstory to justify why I spent a considerable amount of money to replace perfectly working (decent looking as well) parts.

Now the prices:

Tail lights:
MRP $900 apiece.
Dealer price typically tends to be 2.5-3X of MRP
The best online discounted price I found and what I paid finally: around $600 apiece
Shipping & duties: Roughly works out to be 50% extra

Headlights:
MRP $2600 apiece (yes!)
Dealer price typically tends to be 2.5-3X of MRP
Even finding a discounted price and importing them would be super expensive, especially given that my lights don’t need replacement.

I found just the lens (typical eBay China stuff) and purchased them for $200 + shipping and duty. This is a pretty advanced DYI (for me) and you can still mess up the bond/sealing between the housing and lens – as usual Porsche designed the lights to be hard to repair.

I came across LED aftermarket lights with 992 styling. Here is a comparison of OE on the left and the new LED on the right.

They look great and are made by a fairly reputed aftermarket light company called Morimoto. $1800 for a pair. The only problem is they make only for LHD cars (US market). All my attempts to find if these fit RHD cars did not yield any useful info – always got the standard reply “tested only with cars sold in the USA, no clue about other markets”. I looked up some videos and images online and tried to compare them with my car and I felt it would work. So here they are after $1800 + shipping and duties.

LHD lights, apart from physical fitment, also require headlight beam pattern adjustment to match the RHD traffic. I was able to manage this as the lights come with a provision to adjust the beam height. OEM lights have a dynamic cornering feature which is lacking in these aftermarket lights resulting in an error “Headlight beam adjustment failure” – this needs some coding changes which I hope to take care of during the next service visit.

After some elbow grease and cuss words, I managed to put everything together and the makeover is really impressive.

Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.

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