Headlamp Assembly Design

It's nice to see the Asian OEM's adopting a more common sense approach to their car design. Unfortunately, American OEM's have not. My 1998 Dodge Ram has a replacement bulb type headlamp with a permanent bezel. In order to remove the bulb you have to remove the air filter case AND the battery from behind the bulb. Seems American OEM's have adopted the attitude, "The harder we make it to fix, the more money we can charge you fixing it at the dealership." I have subsequently gone back to German Engineering.

Thanks Dodge

My 7-year old Ford Windstar takes this a step further - no tools required. All you need to do is pull out two strips of metal used to lock the headlamp assembly in place and the entire assembly comes out. These locking strips are easily accessible and have tabs so they can be pulled out by hand. Then you unplug and swap out the bulb, put the assembly back, and replace the locking strips. Start to finish, this is about a 2 minute job. I'm not a Ford fan, but in this case they definitely have one up on Suzuki and Dodge.