Once no brighter than a birthday candle, LED lights have become retina-searing fireballs. LED is short for light-emitting diode, and while LED bulbs have been around for decades, the technology that allows them to shine brightly after dark is a relatively recent arrival.
Bright LED-generated light isn’t the whole story, since HID lights and many halogen lights provide plenty of night-piercing illumination. The main attractions offered by LED lights are long bulb life, low amperage draw, and overall ruggedness. Compared to halogen and HID lights, LED lights are much more shock-, vibration-, water-, and dust-resistant. Unlike HID lights, which typically need a minute or more to warm up and reach full brightness, LED lights produce full illumination power as soon as the switch is flipped. Good news all the way around.
There’s more, though, and thanks to compact bulb size and comparatively cool operating temperature, it’s possible to place multiple LED bulbs fairly close together. In turn, this makes for lots of options when designing off-road LED lights. Square, round, or rectangular, LED lights come in many shapes and sizes. Today’s LED off-road buyer has a ton of choices, so we’ve assembled a collection of LED lights for your perusal. Rather than simply photographing each light in the studio and listing the specifications, we took it a step further by field-testing each light.
How We Tested
Our first challenge was finding a suitable spot. We needed to get away from the glare of city lights, and we needed a location that offered a combination of flat, open ground and recognizable objects in the distance. For consistency’s sake, we used the same vehicle to test every light: our 2004 4Runner.
Using a pair of jumper wires, we connected each light directly to the battery. The jumper wires are thick 12-gauge stranded wires, so there’s no risk of amperage loss. To make sure the battery’s output was consistent we left the engine running while we tested.
