headlight upgrade

The short life has a couple of solid explanations:

1. the blue-tinted glass they use to color the light (it's not "whiter" as claimed; the light blue tint just masks the brownish light color that comes from bulbs starved by cheap OE wiring) blocks a substantial amount of light that would pass through uncolored glass. All bulb types (9006, 9007, 9004, H4, H1, the capsule inside a sealed beam, etc.) have an allowable range of output. Typically it's nominal value ±15%. That means a 30% allowable range, so for a bulb type with a nominal rating of 1000 lumens, such as a 9006 or the low beam of an H4, anything from 850 to 1150 lumens is allowed. (And yes, you can buy bulbs that put out from the low end to the high end of the allowed range. If you drive at night, you want as much light as you can get -- properly focused, of course, but now I'm straying off topic). You color the glass, less light gets through. So you have to put in a high-zoot filament and drive the snot out of it to overcome the filtering losses and get minimum legal levels of light through the colored glass. Such a filament, thus overdriven, has a short life. This is lose/lose/lose: max dollars for min light and short lifespan. Pfft.

2. the short life plus the BS advertisement about "brighter and whiter" etc. makes a lot of money for Sylvania.