How to Replace Headlights 2008-12 Chevy Malibu

We're going to go right along the bottom of the bumper cover, and you're going to see all these bolts. Remove them all. Remove your push clips that come along your wheel well to the bumper. When you slide this away, you can look right up here, and you're going to see a 10-millimeter mounting bolt. Remove that as well. There'll be a push clip right here, and then on the other side of this, there's another one there. Remove them both. Now, let's do the same to the other side of the vehicle. Now, let's move along under the hood. What we're going to do is we're going to remove our 10-millimeter headed bolts. You're going to notice they come all the way across, and, of course, there's also going to be some push clips. We need to get them all off of here. For these push clips, you want to grab the centers, lift out, and then grab the outer portion. Let's get this out of here. Let's grab onto this bumper cover. Pull it away from the body of the vehicle a little bit. We're going to lift up. Draw this away as well. Remove this from the vehicle. Now, we have a nice, clear view of our headlight. We're going to remove the mounting bolts for it. You're going to find there's one on the outer portion right here, 10-millimeter, and then one right over here. We're going to remove the pair of those. Carefully slide this out, and then we need to disconnect the assembly itself. If you come right here, you can squeeze this little tab. You should be able to draw that off. There it is, friends.

Now, it's going to be time to get our brand new headlamp assembly in here. Let's go ahead and connect in the connector. Give it a nice tug. Make sure it's secure. We're going to want to make sure once we get this in that we secure the wiring so it can't flop around, but we'll do that in a minute. You also want to make sure that that little hookey-do goes underneath this flap as well. This piece right here should slide up inside the body right there. Just come low, set it close, and then slide it up and in. Start in your bolts. Just check your lines. Make sure it looks decent. All right. Let's give these a test. Perfect. Let's continue. Now, if you look right here, you can see there's a little slot, and if you look on the backside of the headlamp assembly right down there, there's an area that you're going to slide it on to. To adjust the headlights, you're going to use a nice, long Phillips head screwdriver like this one, slide right down along the backside of the headlamp assembly, and then if you needed to go down with the beam, you would turn your screwdriver counterclockwise, which would be to the left, and if you wanted to bring the beam up to align it, you would turn it clockwise. Now, it's going to be time to get our bumper cover back on here. We want to be very careful not to damage any paint, so I'm just going to carefully come up like this, slide it up along the top. Just try to rest it up there for now. Come along the side, just make sure everything is lining up the way that it needs to. And you definitely don't want to hit up against your paint. If you look right along here on the bumper cover, you're going to see that there's some tabs. They need to slide right up along the top there. Set that in. Give it a nice loving bonk. Okay. Do the same to the other side. Let's get this up on here. I've got some push clips. You start with pushing in the outer portion, and then you lock it in by pushing in the center. Snug them all up. Let's get all this situated back up here. I'm just going to use some push clips and a screw. Pretty much just put back the screws and push clips from where we got them from. Don't forget to put in your little corner bolt for your bumper cover. Let's get our push clips in there. All right. Let's do the same to the other side of the vehicle. Okay. So, all that's left at this point is just to go ahead and line up those headlights and take it for a road test.

This is going to be a general tutorial on how to aim your brand new TRQ headlamp assemblies. Okay. So, looking at your brand new TRQ headlamp assembly, you're going to see where your low beam is, and you'll see a little dot right in the center. And that is the axis point, okay? So, what we're going to do is we're going to mark that with an erasable marker, just so it's easier to see. Next, what we need to do is measure from the level ground up to this point and take note of that measurement. Now, we're just going to pull the car up to our wall. On our vehicle, we remember that the measurement was 28 inches for our axis point. Your vehicle may be different, but that's where I'm going to put this tape, just above that 28 inches. We'll do the same on the other side. Okay. So, let's just back the vehicle up straight back 25 feet from the wall. And now that we moved our vehicle 25 feet back from the wall, we're going to start with our measurement here. That's where the headlamp center is. We're going to go down 4 inches on the driver side. On the passenger side, we have our line here. What we need to do is go down 2 inches. To adjust the driver side, we're going to cover our passenger side headlamp. If you look at the backside of your headlamp assembly, you're going to see something that looks like this. This is the adjustment. Some of these headlight assemblies have one, two, or even more of them, but you should at least have one. This is how we're going to adjust the headlight beam. Now, we're going to lower the top part of the beam down to just below this line. When you turn the adjustment to the right, it brings the beam up, and if you turn it to the left, it'll bring the headlight beam down. And this is this way on most vehicles. Let's continue on to doing the passenger side. All right. We properly aligned our TRQ headlamp assemblies.

Okay. And on the quality TRQ headlamps for a pickup truck, the procedure is going to be the same. You're going to find your center dot, mark it, and then you'll measure from the level ground up to your dot. So, once your headlamps are properly adjusted, it'll be time to adjust your fog lamps. You'll notice on the driver's side, the focal point is all the way at the bottom right now. I would like to bring it up so it meets up with approximately the bottom of the focal point of the headlight. Some fog lamps have an adjuster, others don't. The ones that do have an adjuster, you would just turn the adjustment to the left or to the right to adjust the beam up and down to where it needs to be. Now, with your TRQ headlamps and fog lamps properly aligned, you can drive down the road safely.