1997 CHRYSLER TOWN AND COUNTRY User Comment / Complaint

The clear plastic lenses on the front of my headlight assemblies were defectively designed as the plastic is especially prone to damage by uv light, heat, cold, &/or road chemicals. the plastic after a few years has come to be fogged or hazed or cloudy looking... and upon close inspection also has thousands of tiny cracks throughout each lens. our vehicle is a 1997 chrysler t&c which we purchased in 2000. by 2002 we noticed the headlights at night were getting dimmer and it got progressively worse until about 2004 when i bought brighter bulbs to try to compensate for this. it did not help at all. the damaged lenses causes severe diffraction of the light coming from the bulbs creating essentially a pair of very bright "night lights" on the front of the car. by 2005 vision was limited to 25-50 feet at night depending on weather conditions. this made night time driving extremely dangerous and so we stopped driving it at night at highway speeds. in late 2005, after checking the cost of having them replaced and finding that it would be $400-500 per light, i decided to replace them myself. at local auto parts stores the part alone is $219-255.88 each plus tax. i then searched the internet where i found and bought them from www.yourautopartstore.com. the sku numbers are hl 3163 and hl 3164 and the total was $221.24 including shipping for the pair. i installed and aligned them myself. it is my feeling that this crucial part should never deteriorate with time, and that the cost of replacement should be borne by the manufacturer for designing these defective, and expensive to replace parts.  view