Category: Cars

The brakes upgrade on my TT has been a great success. Now that I can stop safely I am ready to fix the front end of my TT. The original owner was in Texas and this car has more than enough paint chips on the front bumper. The headlights are also becoming clouded.

I’ve been looking for new headlights. There seems to be three options.

OEM Replacements

You can purchase OEM replacements from Hella and Magneti Marelli from Amazon. These come in regular or xenon flavor and are not cheap. They’ll cost $300 to 1,000 a piece.

Restore the headlight

There are polishing compounds designed to remove the cloudiness from headlights. I’ve had this done by a detail shop once and the result was nice for about 6 months, but it’s coming back. One person on the Audi TT forum suggests wet sanding the headlights with a fine grade sandpaper to restore the surface and then buffing.

After restoring the headlights, you may consider adding a protective film to the surface.

LED Headlights

There seems to be only one aftermarket headlight for the Audi TT. Spyder creates a projection headlight with LED lights that mimic the strip in the Audi R8. These headlights will cost around $400 for the pair.

You can also purchase matching tail lights.

I’ve looked for used headlights on various web sites, but the savings are not significant and new headlights from the dealer are pretty pricey. To summarize, restoring your headlights are the cheapest route, but may not last forever. As my mom liked to say “You can only polish a turd so many times.” The LED projection headlights are a reasonable alternative. I’ve seen the tail lights and they are not the same quality as the original versions. I expect the headlights to be of the same quality. Finally, you could order OEM headlights from outside the dealer and get the great quality while still saving some money.

Now that I’ve figured out my headlight options I need to start evaluating a new bumper cover. I’m considering the kits that upgrade the TT to the larger grill design of the post-2006 models.

Update

I just got the car out of the shop. I went with the updated headlights, which cost about $425. I picked up a used 2001 bumper for $200, a new bumper is around $750. I also bought a new honeycomb grill to replace the stock bars. I haven’t driven it at night with the lights on yet, but so far I’m pretty happy with the result.