Since Cherokees are so common I like to do little things to make my Jeeps look just a little bit different, for the ’96 I decided to equip it with European Spec lighting.
See more information below:The European-spec Cherokee has slightly different lighting. The tail lamps have a different arrangement, the early model parking lamps are amber instead of clear, there are no side marker lamps, and they have a small repeater turn indicator on the front fenders. I had my buddy Rainer in Austira find me a complete set of lights and send them off to me, about a year later I got around to installing them. The installation is pretty straight forward, take your old lights out and put your new lights in. The only more advanced things you need to do is drill a hole for the repeater lamp (I have not installed these yet as the lamps I have are broken) and wire in the rear fog lamps if you so desire.
I started out by bringing a circuit back fro my rear fog lamps. I tapped into an auxiliary fuse box I have and brought a 14g positive wire (protected by a 10a fuse) back to the right quarter panel area. Then I took a 22g wire from a dashboard switch and brought it back to the same area, I wired both to a relay then ran my wires out to the tail lamp areas. To cross over to the drivers side tail lamp I routed the positive wire underneath the rear cargo area trim, there is sufficient clearance here to keep the wire from being damaged if your put it in the correct area, I picked up the grounds for each fog lamp bulb locally. After I got that done I took my US Spec lamps off and put the European spec ones in place. I retained the front side marker lamps for now because I did not install the repeater lamp, when I put the repeater lamp on I will remove the US Spec front market bulbs (EU spec is simply a reflector).
As usual click on any image to see it’s full size counterpart.
EU spec on left, US spec on right.
US spec park lamp.
EU spec park lamp.
Rear fog lamp on. Turn indicator is amber field above fog lamp, then backup lamps above that and stop/tail at the top.
That’s it, with those simple little steps my Jeep looks just a little bit different from all the others out there. I also think the amber park lamps look a lot better than the clear lamps with a black grille.
Sequoia