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The Standard Operating Procedure for a set of bi-xenon lights.
The lights operate off a D2R xenon High Intensity Discharge (HID) bulb that requires a ballast to ignite the oxides and salts inside the bulb. The igniting voltage is in the vicinity of 25,000 V, give or take 10% (on better ballasts, 5%), after the light ignites, the voltage drops down to normal level to sustain the bulb ignited. since the HID light take time to ignite and then cool off (oxides solidify inside the bulb when electrical chanrge is not applied), and firing them off again in a quick succession will result in premature failure, the manufacturers emplyed the following tactics to achieve the high beam with the HID and also satisfy a common road practice of flashing light as a road courtesy.
When the turn signal stalk is pulled towards the driver, the highbeams that are closer to the center of the car (inner lights) ignite a regular, incandescent light bulb that has been used by industry for decades. The same action will extinguish the front fog lights on the cars used in the markets where it is against the law to operate the high beam simultaneously with the front fog lights. The effect of this action is momentary - the high beams will stay as long as the stalk is manually held in the pulled position, and the engine is running regardless if the main lightning of the car is on or not.
when the stalk is pushed away from the driver, a metal shield inside the projector light assembly is moved by the means of a mechanical relay, thus opening the mechanical blockage of the light and making the light pattern instead of being cut-off at the top, to be circular in the appearance. The fogs still extinguish.
I should have pictures of the opened bixenons by Hella that illustrate this point.
As a result, when you flash the highbeams at somebody, you activate the halogen light bulbs in the inner set of lights, when you turn the bi-xenon lights on, you remove the metal shield from the path of the light coming from D2R. In the real life settings, it could be hard to see the real difference between the low beams and the high beams, unless you are on a seriously dark road, and then you see...
All of that, assuming that the system operates as designed... Of course, there could be a gazillion errors that are not accounted for in this explanation...
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