Hi, I'm new here.
I have a V50 1.6 D, 2006. It's a fine car but the low beam lights are crap. They light up both sides, but the middle of the road is dark. High beam is fine. I've tried to change the bulbs, but no improvement. Cheap H7 bulbs position the beam better, but there's too little light, especially when the roads are wet. I live in an area with many small, bad country roads with no markings on the side, and sometimes it gets pretty dangerous driving in the night.
As I understand, it's not possible, or at least not easy, to adjust the beam's sideways direction. I have the feeling that the bulbs I've tried simply are not right for my car. When I search on Amazon for compatible bulbs, I find only bulbs with very little effect, giving a light that would have been ok in the 70s, but not now. When a car with strong lights comes towards me, I go blind because my lights are so bad relatively to other cars'. If I want to see where on the road I am, I have to switch to high beam - which makes the other car do the same, of course, and I'm just as blind
I can't even understand how my car passed the MOT with these lights, but it did.

Any ideas for where I could find better bulbs for this car, or what else I could do?

 

Assuming you have the halogen projector lights (don't know the specs for Europe) you may be able to find some reasonably priced LED lights that will be brighter. The key there is to make sure that they're designed to put the light out at the same point that the halogen bulbs do.

I did that with my Jeep - not projectors, but Euro-spec "better" headlights, and got something like 2.5x the lumens, and with a much whiter (not blue though) light.

Make sure the vertical adjustments are proper - I am pretty picky about lights, and remember that my V50 headlights were plenty adequate (don't recall if I swapped the bulbs or not though - it's been a while).

 

Thanks, yes it's halogen, H7. When I bought the car it came with very weak standard H7 bulbs and also those were pointing too far to the sides. I've tried with several brighter halogen replacements, they give way more light but point even further out to the sides. Vertical alignment of the bulbs is easily adjustable, lateral is not.
I've been thinking about LED replacements but have no idea whether they would solve the alignment problem. I'll try that.

 

Do you know whether this requires a conversion kit?

 

Are your left/right , up/down adjustments not the ones circled in the picture below?

 

haven't seen those. The Haynes manual says there are no such adjustments for my model and any adjustments need to be done by Volvo. Also, the high beam is adjusted nicely and gives a lot of light even with standard bulbs. It looks to me that these adjustment screws would move the reflectors or at least all the bulbs rather than the low beam bulbs alone.
But I'll look again, thanks for the tip.

 

Hi, I had the same problem with my recently acquired V50 dipped beams. I found that both bulbs had been located about 90 degrees out of alignment in their holders. A simple adjustment to their position to get them back into the locating position cured the problem.

 

Yea, thanks. My bulbs have been fitted by a garage and passed the MOT like that. That was the problem here, too. I bought some bright Philips bulbs and fitted them correctly. It's not great light now, but it's ok. I guess to get better, I'd need new reflectors.
Apparently, it's easy to get them in wrong, which I never had experienced with other cars.