Oh, this thread makes my brain hurt and the engineer in me shed a tear. Let’s start with the WYOSVXs original post.
If you want to repurpose the fog lamp, you will need to remove the fluting from that portion of the headlamp lens. The textured bit of the lens is designed to bend the light from a filament-style bulb and direct it down on the ground, near the front of the car. If you want a pencil-beam in that location, no amount of HID/re-aiming/higher-wattage bulb will change the physics of the fluted lens. To answer your questions, yes, there are options to improve the lighting, and no, the existing reflector/lens is not adequate.
In Washington state and several other states, it is illegal to install “HID retrofit” kits in your car, and for good reason. For the same reasons your fog lamp’s reflector and lens are inadequate for a pencil-beam, the low beam projector in the SVX headlamp is designed for a filament-style bulb. The way light is emitted from a filament is a fundamentally different shape than HID bulbs (a straight line vs. an arc of electricity). By putting a HID retrofit kit in place of a filament bulb, the light emitted will be scattered all over the place, not at all where the design engineers expected it to be. This is why you have to re-aim headlamps after installing HIDs. NOT because they put out so much more light (they can) but because all that light is unfocused and misdirected. By re-aiming the lamps, you are taking light off the horizon (where it is most effective at night) and aiming it down right in front of your car (where it does you no good at all and actually hurts your night vision, and therefore reduces your reaction time).
Same deal with HIDs in the high beams. Instead of a tightly focused beam waaaaaay down the road, you are shooting light off into outer-space and down onto the road in front of the car.
gearheadE30 is right, to get any sort of improvement out of our headlamps, you essentially need to surgically install HID-specific projectors. It is not that expensive to do yourself (especially after you factor in how many sets of cheap Chinese HID retrofits you will end up buying over the years, figure $2-400 in parts for your typical HID conversion). I plan to install HID projectors in my German, glass headlamps once I get back to working on the SVX.
I would NEVER put a re-based HID bulb in my car, it is a FAIL on every level. There is no point to try to justify it, it’s illegal in several states and dangerous to you and other drivers.
I'm not trying to bash you guys who have already retrofitted your SVXs, just trying to let anyone who stumbles across this in the future know the truth about this subject.
http://www.theretrofitsource.com
http://www.lightwerkz.net