Off-Road Lighting Buyers’ Guide

• November 13, 2024
• Story By
  Ali Mansour - Off-Road & Truck Editor

There are plenty of reasons why you might need to increase the lighting on your off-road vehicle. Luckily, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to outfit your truck or SUV with aftermarket lights. In this article, we will go over some of the most important things to consider before purchasing a lighting upgrade. This way, you can avoid the often-confusing marketing light lingo and invest in what you actually need.

Lumens

Lighting manufacturers use lumens to indicate how bright their light is. If you are comparing lights to one another, you must be careful to make sure you are looking at the same lumen rating. Lumens are generally broken into two rating categories, raw and effective. In general, lighting companies list the raw lumen figure because that number will be higher than the effective lumen figure.

Raw vs Effective Lumens

Effective lumens factor in such things as the time the light is on, heat, as well as the lighting optics. These, along with an assortment of other factors, can greatly impact the effective lumen number. In fact, a raw lumen count can get cut by as much as 40 percent. While lumen count is still the best indicator at how much light it will produce, there are definitely many factors that will impact how effective it will be on your vehicle.

Light Color

Light temperature is equally as important as lumen count in some respects. Currently, we are seeing a very gradual shift to amber lighting in the off-road world. Amber is a very warm light as opposed to a more traditional cooler clear/white light. The benefit of amber is that it’s supposed to be easier on your eyes at night. While we can’t say for sure that it impacts eye fatigue greatly for us, amber lenses do an excellent job of bringing out more detail in the terrain, which is extremely helpful. Given the option, we would go with amber over clear for most off-road scenarios.

Beam Pattern

There are two main light types- fog and spot. Spot is considered a driving light, and it’s optimized for distance, not necessarily light spread. A fog is going to give you a wider beam pattern. Ideally, you want a bit of both for general trail wheeling. Many companies offer hybrid style lenses, which will give you the ability to have both beam patterns in one light.

High Mount Lights

Where you mount your lights can be nearly as important as the light itself. Higher, rack or windshield mounted ones, have some serious pros and cons. While having a light up high does help with extending your light reach, it can create a glare on your hood and through the windshield. This glare creates eye fatigue. Putting some sort of matte vinyl protection on your hood to reduce glare can significantly help with this issue. Higher mounted lights can create more wind noise as well.

Ditch Lights

Ditch lights are ideal for low-speed off-roading as they can illuminate otherwise hidden drop-offs and obstacles next to the vehicle. For these to be the most effective, you want to have the light positioned outwards so you can get the most light spread. There are some lights, such as these GG Lighting CB30 pods, which create a 270-degree beam pattern. This will allow them to work as a spot and ditch light.

Bumper Lights

If we had one area we would recommend aftermarket lighting, it’s the front bumper of the vehicle. A bumper light needs to be well protected and not so large that it can impede air flow. A lower mounted bumper light may not give you as much distance as a high mount one, but there are plenty of extremely powerful light options on the market that can fit the bill.