Headlight aim too high

[Alex-W]

So, following a friend home last night, who also has an Octavia of the same age, he pulls over..

 

I stop and he says to get out and take a look at my lights.

My driver's side light was much higher than the passenger side and binding him in his wing mirror.

 

For some reason the aim is much higher than the passenger side.

 

Due to him having the same car with the same lights we had the advantage of being able to also directly compare to his and yep, definitely to high on my driver's light.

 

My question is, is this a common problem or is there a likely cause, before I go and ask the dealer to sort it under warranty?

 

I am assuming they auto level and like my other car, the sensor is at the back, and that that sensor should control both the lights so the fact that they're not doing the same thing points to a fault with the unit itself?

 

Cheers

[Jaco2k]

If you have the opportunity to put your car side by side with your friend's and you don't want to over-complicate or overthink this, I would suggest you simply manually adjust the lights to match the alignment on friend's car and just move on with your life

...it will take you around 5 minutes and you don't need to take the car to a dealership where they will likely not set them right anyway.

In my current car I complained twice the alignment was off and was told "it is within tolerances", which is a polite way of saying "we did nothing".

I just put my car next to another with a known good alignment and fixed it myself.

I now feel the lights aim correctly - not too high not too low.

[Jaco2k]

And sorry, to answer your question, the auto-levelling cannot fix this type of issue - the lights still need to be correctly manually set and the auto-level takes on from there to keep them at the level they were manually set to on a flat ground.

[Alex-W]

Oh.... Glad I asked then!

 

I assumed there was no manual adjustment on the xenons and that it was all done by the automatic control, esp seeing as they auto adjust for drying on the right etc I'm told.

 

If it's a case of setting them manually that's a bit different.

[Tech1e]

You should in theory have them in setting mode which is initiated with diagnostics so the new setting is saved as the control position. What happens otherwise is as soon as the lights start up the motors move the lights back to the last calibrated position. 

[indars]

2 hours ago, Jaco2k said:

If you have the opportunity to put your car side by side with your friend's and you don't want to over-complicate or overthink this, I would suggest you simply manually adjust the lights to match the alignment on friend's car and just move on with your life

...it will take you around 5 minutes and you don't need to take the car to a dealership where they will likely not set them right anyway.

In my current car I complained twice the alignment was off and was told "it is within tolerances", which is a polite way of saying "we did nothing".

I just put my car next to another with a known good alignment and fixed it myself.

I now feel the lights aim correctly - not too high not too low.

Same here in LV- workshops usually sets lights too low (but within MOT tolerance!)- to be sure that client pass MOT. As result, you see nothing on road. Have even ground and straight big workshop doors in my job- and am setting lights by myself: marks with black tape on door, car 10m from door, inclination percents...