Dr_Mike
Established Member
The other day I noticed one of the headlight bulbs was out on my Focus. No problem I thought, so I went to Halfords and bought a replacement and had a smug snigger at their £5 to fit it for you offer. Got home and tried to fit it, but it was dark and couldn't really see what I was doing so I left it until daylight.
In every other car I've had, changing a bulb has been a 30sec job which anyone who could open the bonnet could do so didn't thik it would be too much of a problem. Managed to get the back cover off the headlamp unit and disconnect the power lead but couldn't see how to unclip the bulb so I consulted the user manual. The index said "Bulb replacement....156-164" yet my manual goes from p155 to p189 with nothing in between .
Did a bit of googling and found out that to change a passenger side headlight you've got to either a) remove the battery (not recommended as disconnecting it can mess up the engine management) and a few other bits to get better access or b) remove the whole headlamp unit which would then need re-aligning. Apparently both of these are too complicated for Halfords to do for their £5 so the long and short of it was that I ended up taking it to the garage and paying just over £30 to have a bulb changed !
This is taking the p***. Is this a cynical ploy to boost the ford agents service revenues or just bad design ? I appreciate that things have moved on in terms of packaging, aerodynamics and crash protection from the old days but surely they could do better than this ?
In every other car I've had, changing a bulb has been a 30sec job which anyone who could open the bonnet could do so didn't thik it would be too much of a problem. Managed to get the back cover off the headlamp unit and disconnect the power lead but couldn't see how to unclip the bulb so I consulted the user manual. The index said "Bulb replacement....156-164" yet my manual goes from p155 to p189 with nothing in between .
Did a bit of googling and found out that to change a passenger side headlight you've got to either a) remove the battery (not recommended as disconnecting it can mess up the engine management) and a few other bits to get better access or b) remove the whole headlamp unit which would then need re-aligning. Apparently both of these are too complicated for Halfords to do for their £5 so the long and short of it was that I ended up taking it to the garage and paying just over £30 to have a bulb changed !
This is taking the p***. Is this a cynical ploy to boost the ford agents service revenues or just bad design ? I appreciate that things have moved on in terms of packaging, aerodynamics and crash protection from the old days but surely they could do better than this ?