Yellow headlight illegal or legal

[Cool Cat Racing]

Any tint, tinted film, or covering on a headlight is illegal, doesn't matter the color. Any modification of a DOT approved item is both state and federally illegal, that includes covering it.

Georgia Code
40-8-22. Headlights
(d) The headlights required by this Code section shall be maintained in proper working condition and shall not be covered by any type of material, provided that the covering restriction shall not apply to any vehicle on which the original factory headlights were covered.



Colored bulbs however are questionable. It's a federal issue and there's a complicated color spectrograph thing from the Society of Automotive Engineers handbook that defines the approved color range. Fortunately it makes absolutely no sense to the general public or officers, so until they can 1) decipher the electromagnetic color spectrum and 2) detect what wavelength and colorimetry your lights are compared to the spectrum, they can't lawfully charge you with anything.

Georgia Code
40-8-34. Color in lighting equipment
The color in all lighting equipment covered in this title shall be in accordance with Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Standard J578, April, 1965, as thereafter revised or amended.


Anything that is not US DOT approved is federally illegal, that includes headlights not imported into the US. Every single item bolted to the car has to be DOT tested and approved for it to be legal.

This is not the reason they can't enforce the SAE J578 standad. The book from the SAE is not available anywhere in Ga for free and it has to be in order to be enforceable. I own one but I had to pay $25 for it. The color standard is pretty simple to read really and if anyone looks at a simple headlight color chart that you can get nearly anywhere on the internet you can easily tell if they're legal or not. Yellow is not legal at all, as for fog lights though it is. Fog lights have a different color standard than headlights.

[speedminded]

This is not the reason they can't enforce the SAE J578 standad. The book from the SAE is not available anywhere in Ga for free and it has to be in order to be enforceable. I own one but I had to pay $25 for it. The color standard is pretty simple to read really and if anyone looks at a simple headlight color chart that you can get nearly anywhere on the internet you can easily tell if they're legal or not. Yellow is not legal at all, as for fog lights though it is. Fog lights have a different color standard than headlights.

I was going to mention that, I had it at one time but can't find it any more. Every where it's $25-60+ lol!

I remember it being an x,y coordinate system. Something along the lines as "with a combination of chromaticity coordinates as explained in SAE J578, Color Specification (May 1988), within specific boundaries [y=0.33 (yellow boundary) and y=0.98- ×(purple boundary)]". I think it was updated in 2006 but I don't know what changes were made...