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How I perfected my Mahindra XUV700's low-beam headlight coverage

14th April 2025, 10:29 by Utkarsh Chaudhary

To give you an idea, in city traffic, at levels 3 and 2, it was cutting off nicely just below the rear glass of a Tata Nexon which was about 5-6 car lengths ahead.

BHPian Sandegov recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

For all the folks who are not happy with their low beam throw:

Here is a brief of my DIY fix that I did on a lazy Sunday morning.

Problem statement:

I wasn't too convinced with the throw of my 700 on low beams at night and it didn't help that M&M had no documentation on how to adjust the headlight focus neither did their ASC have an SOP and a headlight adjustment chart for 700.

Solution:

I went with a basic old-school method that I had seen one of my friends do in the US before his DMV inspection. At that time it didn't quite register with me but on reading about it now it was pretty simple and straightforward:

Measure your headlight height from the ground and mark a horizontal line on a wall at that height.
Pull your car back 25ft from the wall and then adjust your light cut-off to be at this line for cars whose headlights are 34in & below and for cars >34in adjust the cutoff line to be 4 inches below the marked line on drivers side and 2 inches below on passenger side.

Execution:

Spent a good 2 hrs on my 700 with the hood open and removed a few panels out before I was able to identify and be fully convinced on the headlight setup and the possible adjustmemts in 700.

Headlights on 700 have three elements:

Low beam on the outer portion
High beam in the upper half of the inner portion
High beam assist in the lower half of the inner portion.

The back of the high beam housing has two screws with a gear setup as shown in the below picture - one for vertical adjustment and the other for horizontal. Which is for what can be found only with trial and error and there are no markings. My high beam I felt was good and I didn't touch these.

The low beam housing comes with a slightly diff setup and I have marked the ones for vertical and horizontal adjustment in the picture below.

These screws can be turned two ways - horizontally using the screw head or vertically using the gears. A Phillips screwdriver is what you will need for both (deep grooves for the vertical option help). Anticlockwise for going higher/right and vice versa.

With all this done.

Step 1: I now pulled up the 700 to the wall and measured the height of the headlight which was about 35in from the ground and marked it with a long horizontal line.

Step 2: Checked the cut-off line of the low beam and high beam it was exactly at the marked line. This I did to mark factory setting in case I had to revert back.

Step 3: Pulled back the car 25ft from the wall and turned on my low beam and set the leveller to 2. You can see that the cut-off was too low almost below the halfway from the marked line.

Step 4: Turned on the high beam and it looked ok to me at slightly above the marked line.

Step 5: Adjusted the low beam using the adjustment screws and lifted up the cutoff line to be just below the marked line and the end result as shown below.