The wider LED beam setting works until 38 mph then the beam wide beam setting turns off..

It works great at lower speeds since you can see better what is on your sides.

 

That's noticeable driving in the evening today. The high beams didn't come on as no opportunity to drive on darker roads came by. I do think it's working due to these differences. The side illumination alone is a major improvement.

Im curious to see the reach on highway driving, which is what this is best for.

There are other things to activate that the car has modules for. Updates to come.

 

Great work here. So does the US car need to change to another region in PIWIS or just activate the active matrix?

 

Just activate seems to do the trick. Dark roads still needed to confirm functionality

 

anyone around Dc , md, va area that can do this ?

 

Hi guys, new member. Been following this post. Kudos to @John Mclane , great info.

I just want to confirm a few things:
1. Guess US DOT never got around to approving this feature in USA? It was supposedly imminent back in 19'
2. Does this make it fully functional, or just for cornering and sub 38 MPH?
3. Steps:
For 9Y0 Cayenne:

• Battery Maintainer + full charge
• PIWIS 3
• Make sure you already have PDLS+
• Diagnostics-F7 (additional menu)- maintenance data- find the two entries for headlights, choose PLDS+ incl Matrix. - Save (F8).
• Go back to the initial menu. Choose all modules- programming- automatic programming.
• Wait and freak out about the lights and sounds.
• Read and delete errors.

 

Disclaimer- my friend still needs to try the car on dark roads to see if it works as advertised.

 

forgive me - but I’ve read the thread and I’m failing to see what enabling this feature accomplishes...

does anyone have a nice high level summary of what we get if we enable this feature?

 

It's the PDLS+ feature described in the manual and on the Porsche website.

@JCWLS3 said it with his post one the first page of the forum "Yep. That's correct. Your 84-pixeled PDLS+ headlight is effectively rendered into a single pixel by DOT restriction. We went in fully aware of this when we placed our Turbo order way back in early 2019. I'm not holding my breath the advanced technology will ever be retrofitted here in the U.S., even after eventual DOT approval.

We bought the headlights for the look, frankly. The standard units looked wimpy by comparison."

 

This explains it pretty well...https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.car...ad-headlights/

 

Did you drive the car at night yet??

 

Not really, need darker roads. The lateral beam is different and shifts forward when you pick up speed. I glanced it shadowing a car in front of me.
There may be some degree of calibration needed as well. That menu on PIWIS is vast. Gotta be very careful fiddling with the car modules.

 

Hi John, thanks for your (errr....your friend's) work on this and reporting on it. I'm sitting here with an order in and a couple more days before it's locked - can you do me a favor and go drive in the dark (very) soon? Pretty please? Trying to decide whether to tick the box and get these headlghts on the car. Thanks!

 

I tried, but in the Chicago burbs, most roads are well lit. Some of the functionality is there, I could notice the lights delineating a car when I merged to a road, but it's so busy and lit that I can't tell much.
I believe there's some degree of calibration also required to make it work properly. For that I need more time as I can't find any decent resources on how to do it. It's not difficult to mess up those modules.
Check videos on the cayenne in Germany with matrix working. To be honest, it's ok-ish, not the game changer that xenon were in relation to halogens and to a lesser degree, LED to xenons. Or maybe you can find others doing this with proven success. If you do, please let us know, so we try to reproduce it.

 

I would think part of the decision might include how long you typically own your cars. People will figure out the codes. And at some point, these will be fully approved. It could happen a month from now, a year from now, or even two years from now. If you typically own your cars for 5 years, then you are likely to have better lighting for at least half of that time, and hopefully much more. If you swap them out every 18 months, then perhaps make it something to get on your next vehicle.