If you’ve ever dealt with replacing a modern headlight assembly before, you’ll know they’re insanely expensive. The pods that hold the lights, daytime-running lights, and turn signals can easily cost four figures.
Because they’re usually sealed together with glue, replacing individual parts within the assembly is a huge pain, to the point where it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new unit. For years now, owners and insurance companies have had to front massive costs to get headlights fixed, even when there’s only minor damage.
Mercedes, under the guise of wishing to make it easier for scrapyards to disassemble and recycle parts, finally has a solution—one that I hope the rest of the industry follows.
Mercedes Wants To Make Sure Its Cars Are Easy To Recycle
Have you ever wondered what happens to a car when it’s no longer viable as a car? Whether it’s been crashed, broken to the point of being too expensive to fix, or rusted to the point of being unsafe to drive, cars like this usually end up in a junkyard to be salvaged.
Even if a car can’t be driven anymore, it still has some value. Cars are complex machines with a lot of different parts, which means even worthless examples usually have working or undamaged pieces that can be salvaged and sold (glass, body panels, interior pieces, wheels, etc.), and metals that can be recycled. This is how salvage yards make their money.
Because cars are made up of so many different materials and assembled in increasingly intricate ways, it’s impossible to recycle everything from a vehicle in a reasonable time frame. Taking apart a modern car by hand, with all of its wiring, glue, welds, and fittings, can take weeks. So a lot of recyclable materials end up in the trash because they’d take too long to separate from the rest of the car. There usually isn’t much delicacy when it comes to this type of work:
Mercedes, realizing a lot of materials that could’ve been recycled in the dismantling process are ending up in the trash, never to be used again, has launched a new initiative within the company called Tomorrow XX. The program is taking a look at more than 40 components, reengineering them to reduce their carbon footprint and make them easier to use again as raw materials. From the release:
At the end of a vehicle’s lifecycle, Mercedes-Benz wants to close the loop and return as many recyclable materials as possible to the system. The prerequisite for material recycling is ensuring components are easy to dismantle and that different materials can be separated by type.
How, exactly, does Mercedes plan to do this? Less glue and less welding, by the sounds of it.
Finally, A Modern-Day Headlight That Makes Sense
Previously, replacing something as simple as a headlight lens or bulb on a modern headlight assembly would take a ton of hours and a lot of painstaking glue-related work, where you’d have to heat up the glue and peel apart delicate pieces of plastic. Do it wrong, and you’ll end up breaking something (ask me how I know). Mercedes’ new headlight concept sidesteps all of that with an exceedingly simple method:
The various components such as the lens, cover trim and frame, housing and electronics are joined with fasteners rather than glue (today’s standard practice). As a result, the headlight can be separated into individual components with ease and without damage. This means individual components can be replaced, making a modern headlight repairable for the first time. Following a stone chip, for instance, there is no need to replace the entire headlight, just the lens. For customers, this could make repairs more efficient in future. The longer service life of headlights could also help conserve resources and minimize carbon emissions.
This is exactly how headlight assemblies used to be, when stuff was easy to fix. I feel like this sort of fastening method could’ve been reimplemented on modern headlights years ago, when manufacturers started realizing how expensive and annoying dealing with glue was. Alas, it was probably quicker and cheaper to use glue, which is why virtually every headlight assembly still uses it.
Mercedes goes on to say that each part of the headlight is made from one specific material, making those parts easier to sort for reuse or recycling. The company estimates that using this type of assembly could reduce carbon emissions by nearly 50 percent by saving on manufacturing. I’m just happy it won’t cost owners an arm and a leg to replace a cracked lens anymore.
Headlights are just the tip of the iceberg for Mercedes. It provides the door panel, a shockingly complicated part in 2025, as another example:
A similarly complex component are interior door panels, which consist of different parts joined by ultrasonic welding. Mercedes-Benz has developed a new joining technology to better and more easily separate individual materials. The adapted thermoplastic rivet is now easy to undo, allowing faster separation of individual components without damage. Optimizing dismantling in this way both simplifies repair and improves recyclability. The new technology could potentially replace a large number of thermoplastic joints in vehicle interiors.
Having dealt with the horrors of disassembling glued-together headlight assemblies and door panels in the past, I really think Mercedes is onto something here. Even if there was no environmental benefit here, I’d be really into this idea, because it makes the lives of repair workers and disassembly facilities way easier. Every other automaker should take notice.
Top graphic images: Mercedes-Benz
It took me a while to realize that the Mercedes in question was not Mercedes Streeter, but the auto manufacturer of her name. It made perfect sense to me that Ms. Streeter figured out a solution to the insane cost of headlights.
Kudos to MB for this, but yes, it should’ve happened industry-wide years ago. Neighbors with late model German cars have regaled me with tales of $2,000+ repair bills for a single headlight, and I’ve read that some of the laser headlights on German uber machines can run into the $6-8,000. range to replace.
I’ve always wondered what the cost to make modern headlight assemblies is? I assume that headlights, like bumpers, have huge markups since they are replaced often in minor accidents. Remember, the cost to make a widget is often not directly tied to the price the widget is sold at.
One problem is NHTSA and FMVSS. The regulations mandate the headlamp assembly (reflector housing and lens or clear cover) be glued together.
When the ECE headlamps were approved in the United States in 1991, two stipulations were placed upon the ECE headlamps: the H4 (HB2) bulb is built to “tighter tolerance” (whatever that means) and the housing and lens be glued together.
Case in point: Audi 90 was first Audi to be sold in the US with ECE headlamps. Yeah, removable glass lens anchored to the housing by metal clips. NHTSA said nope. It must be glued to the housing or be sealed together. Why? The buffons at NHTSA thought people would touch the halogen bulb and burn their fingers. Gee, there are many worst ways to get yourself burnt or maimed in the engine bay!
What that means? The replacement lens cost the equivalent of $20 in Europe, but the replacement of whole headlamp unit cost $400 in US. (Yes, really!)
I remember that too well because my neighbour in Dallas, Texas had a brand-new 1991 Audi 90 that had a cracked lens. He was so incensed by the cost and asked us if we could source the headlamp units from Germany and arranged with our military friends based there to ship them by APO bypassing the customs. The package included a set of replacement lenses. The neighbour couldn’t believe how cheap they were: about DM 220 per unit.
NHTSA should be dismantled like USAID for its sheer incompetency…
Wasn’t USAID responsible for saving millions of lives with a budget that was basically a rounding error for the US Govt? I think the number was something like 90 million lives saved over 2 decades for like .3% of the annual US Budget.
Given this is ‘Merica’ Likely this “must be glued together” requirement came from auto parts supplier lobbyists.
Lots more profit to be had if you are required to replace the entire headlight unit than just the lense.
Lobbyist bribes the right representing. The right representatives ensure this requirement gets neatly tucked in to some giant spending bill that must be passed like for defense spending or for farmers.
And boom new dumb ‘law’ goes in to effect
Then you get your buddies on certain news channels to use this as an example of how inept fed. got. regulations are & wr should scrap the entire organization…
So it is a win win scenario for the business person that paid the lobbyists, that paid the representative, who profits massively in the end.
And if the fed. agency Does get shut down all the better, then the same people that paid to have this new regulation can profit even more bc rollback of laws or at least of enforcement on all new products.
Most government bureaucracies need to be dismantled or completely gutted and restaffed.
Not to mention all bills should be single issue only and sufficiently narrow in scope.
There has been a similar movement in home appliances, moving from sealed disposable metal boxes back to screws and bolts, with separate mechanical components that can be individually replaced, rather than junking the entire appliance. I remember when there were small kitchen appliance repair shops for toasters, blenders, vacuums etc when these were designed and built to last for decades, rather than be disposed of within five years.
Strange how the expected longevity and reliability of a mechanical device is the inverse of the cpu’s and screens added to them. And at a higher price.
Nothing new here, move along… Saab 9-3 headlights have had this feature since the 90s, and the headlight lens is GLASS, not quickly-yellowing plastic.
Adapted thermoplastic rivet? Isn’t that just a common self-sealing stem bolt?
Similar but not quite the same. Both are evil tools used by the soul-less minions of orthodoxy though
Kukalaka!
I know someone who can get you a good deal on those.
I don’t have any Cardassian Yamok sauce though. Will somewhat expired Kardashian Grandeza hot sauce be OK?
I have to imagine that the part with the lighting element will still cost a billion dollars (maybe even 2 billion)
I doubt this will make any significant difference for CO2 emissions, but it is a huge win for right to repair.
Aim for greenwashing, hit customer satisfaction. I’m actually good with that.
Now do screen purging on the interior in the name of “blue light pollution” or other BS lihe that, so we can have our buttons back.
Right to repair means reduced CO2. It’s much more efficient to fix something than replace it.
These engineers are crowing because they’ve discovered screws and rivets.
They are being allowed to use screws and rivets because the accountants allocated a budget to improve recyclability. And MB are crowing about it so the accountants can charge some of that cost to PR.
Engineers aren’t evil, we just work for evil corporations.
Some aren’t necessarily evil, but they can absolutely be incredibly incompetent.
mutually exclusive.
I know an OEM design engineer who designed a new heatshield around a bearing that could only be bolted up from the inside.
It fitted fine on CAD…
My personal favorite is starters that bolt to the bell housing from the inside.
Also, I have a telescope that had a mounting plate that was held on by screws and nuts. The problem is that you unscrew the screws to replace the totally inadequate plate, and the nuts are now loose inside of the telescope, and ther is no way of reattaching the plate or a replacement. JB weld and a pair of big ass hose clamps fixed it, but all those nuts rattling around in the telescope are really annoying. In theory it could be taken apart and reassembled, but the calibration tools are really expensive and there is probably glue involved. I only bought it for the robotic mount so it’s merely annoying, but if I had planned on using it, I would pissed.
Additionally, screws and rivets are more expensive than gluing operations.
“I’m just happy it won’t cost owners an arm and a leg to replace a cracked lens anymore.” Hahahahaha… good joke. This is Mercedes we are talking about… the individual parts will still be mighty expensive.
A distinguishing feature of my 2004 Acura TL are the High Intensity Discharge (HID) headlights. This was long before LEDs were available for this application. They have not failed, but I don’t think I’ll like the bill, if they do.
It was pretty cheap (Rock Auto) to replace the actual headlamps on our 2001 Highlander after moisture got into the lamps and clouded the inside surface. These have the simple plug in bulbs, which I replaced with LEDs which were inexpensive and are very bright.
HID bulbs aren’t as expensive as you might think. I wanna say I paid about 40 bucks a bulb for Hella bulbs on my VW/Audis.
Hope you checked your headlight pattern with the LEDs…
Yes, but perhaps I didn’t do the best job. Though I’ve only gotten hi-beams flashed at me once. I figure that it is about as annoying as most modern LED headlights. Good to know about HID cost, in case they fail.
Yep, replacing HIDs is a very common mod on many pre-LED cars. Especially changing the temperature to 6000K to get a cooler white color instead of the yellow that many came with from the factory. Depending on the brand, you’re probably only going to be out like $60-100 for a pair.
Mercedes has traditionally been very good about selling individual bits rather than whole assemblies, nice to see them returning to that. I just hope that it doesn’t result in reduced build quality. Which is NOT particularly impressive in the interior of my S212 compared to Mercedes wagons of old (and their current EVs in particular are *atrocious* inside. And I am sure some of that is making modern plastics “easier to recycle”. They tend to start doing it themselves…
Wasn’t this supposed to happen as part of the “End of life vehicle” EU directive, like, 20 years ago? I just remember we had to take the lead out of aluminum, and stop using hexavalent chrome, but there was also a lot about making it possible to recycle car components (and maybe some sort of take-back mandate).
Maybe they’re actually finally doing that.
That was going to be my comment. AFAIK, this is to comply with an EU recycling plan where manufacturers are responsible for their products cradle-to-grave. While this is great, it seems like bragging about doing court-ordered community service.
Hey, maybe BMW was making biodegradable cooling systems this whole time!
Nope, it’s just degradable.
I have this sudden mental image of a car company wearing an ankle bracelet
*cough” VW *cough*
Ha ha HA ha HaH
Sorry, that’s me laughing at the past 3-4 decades of FASTENERS BAD! orthodoxy. When I was taking my DFM courses, it was clear that here are upsides to eliminating fasteners, and there are downsides.
All the upsides are on the manufacturer end, and all the downsides on the consumer end. But yeah from a high-volume production standpoint, fasteners introduce more assembly steps, and your BOM increases. Just more parts to track and find suppliers for. Also, the adhesive probably gets used all over, whereas some companies (cough Mercedes cough) like to use the most specifically sized screw for an application, instead of finding one that is close enough and used elsewhere.
When I open up something to fix it, and find that there are screws used but they managed to use only two or just one kind of screw, adapting the fastening points and clearances as necessary to do that, then I know that there was a proper design engineering team, with a proper mandate.
Bring back the sealed beam!
No
I don’t agree with the ol’ sealed beams returning, but surely some standardization would benefit consumers. I would rather have cheaper, more readily available components than all the fancy features of bespoke lights.
Hell no. But standard sized H4 ecodes ala Hella and Cibie – oh YEAH!
This is the right answer. I just converted my 99 F350 from the original, foggy halogen composite lens to 5×7 sealed beams. Ford offered both composite or sealed beam headlights on super duty trucks well into the 2000s sometime, so a junkyard run got me most of the factory pieces I needed and Rock Auto had the rest. Around $40 total.
But rather than traditional sealed beams, I bought JW Speaker 8910 LED drop in replacements. They are DOT approved and one of the few legal ways to get LED headlights. While you can buy LED 9007 bulbs, they’re not street legal and just create tons of glare. The JW Speaker lights are great, nice pattern and good cutoff. It is weird to me that my 99 truck now has better headlights than my 2018 car with HIDs though.
I don’t think there’s any reason projector dimensions and mounting points couldn’t be standardized. Was just thinking about this the other day. It would be pretty awesome but I think allowances would need to be made for more advanced headlight designs so as to not stifle innovation.
The best thing about sealed beams was that every time you changed one, you got a brand-spankin’-new lens along with it.
Similar to Asimov’s idea that roads would have grooves that would be changed annually, forcing drivers to replace their tires.
Speaking as someone who literally has a Mercedes EPC perma-tab on the screen of the computer I’m using to write this comment, I am STOKED for this! Now, if Porsche could just figure out the same thing, since their headlights fail more than Mercedes…
Nice to see some actual, good news. Another problem with most modern headlights begin a pain in the ass is unscrupulous shops trying to take advantage of people when things aren’t as bad as they first appear.
My neighbor, a nice older lady, recently stopped by and asked if I could look at changing a bad headlight on her Veloster. As we walked out to the car she said she had taken it to “a new place” as her previous mechanic retired earlier this year. She had been quoted $400 to change both headlights as the “front end” would have to come off and both headlights should be done at that time. Not knowing Velosters I told her that could be the case, but sometimes actually removing a bumper cover wasn’t so bad.
Nope, she popped the hood and the car just had the easy to remove halogen bulbs in the back of the head light assembly. I asked her if a six-pack of PBR talls sounded like a better labor estimate. Then I pulled the bulb, gave it to her with instructions stop by Walmart and pick up a couple of the cheapest versions they had after looking up what type she needed and I’d install them when she got back.
She was so happy that I got two six-packs out of the deal 🙂
Two pieces of good news on one page. Kudos!
One more reason I’m happy to have left Firestone this very day. Flipside, we got screwed on labor in a million other ways and had to take the wins where we could.
$400 is fucking nuts though.
It’s strange how many old engineering principle are being repackaged and resold today with much fanfare, sounding like groundbreaking innovation.
Modular parts which can be taken apart and repaired. A modernised API concept hailed as the “new AI internet” (that’s how some companies describe MCP).
But true innovation also happens, lately in metallurgical 3d manufacturing and laser cnc machining.
I’d love to learn more about other big innovations in the automotive space, and I mean that without any irony – genuinely interested.
By laser CNC do you mean like a multi-axis laser? Or a laser in place of a plasma torch for sheetmetal and tubing
The current practice in industry is to use adhesive to seal up the assemblies in an unserviceable way because that’s cheap and reliable. Obviously using fasteners is not some new idea, but making it all work with equal quality and reliability vs. adhesive, and presumably at the right price point probably wasn’t as straightforward as we all imagine.
The current practice in industry is to use adhesive to seal up the assemblies in an unserviceable way because that’s cheap and reliable.
This is true for the manufacturer.
This of course is not true for the vehicle owner when something happens, rock chip, very minor accident, or even simply age, since I don’t know of any headlights on any cars/light trucks available for sale in the USD market at least that doesn’t have plastic lenses which with time will get cloudy.
Typically it’s relatively easy to polish them back to clear, though there are plenty of regular car owners that don’t know this opening them up to think “I need to replace my headlights…” or someone unscrupulous charging way too much to polish them…
Which is a long way of saying, this is a really positive move BACK to modular construction with repair and disassembly in mind which benefits all of us.
Finally some good news from Mercedes Benz! I saw the door panel insert and am happy it can be recycled. All for this to become a trend if possible.
But then I remember that they just released the car subscription to everything possible to subscript, and feel like maybe some parts of the company get it, and others are very out of touch.
you can only buy the trim piece if you have an active subscription 🙂