I enjoy night driving. The woods are far less crowded, and I consider it safer on narrow trails. You can always see the other guy coming way in advance - unless he was irresponsible enough not to upgrade his lighting. As with many things, it's better to have and not need than need and not have.
My previous Silverado (2007.5 NNBS crew cab 4x4 LTZ G80, 6.5" lift, 35s, etc) needed a serious light upgrade. The first time I wound up in the woods at night, I really couldn't see anything. The factory lights - even on an LTZ with fogs - were almost completely useless. Having experimented with a lot of LED headlight upgrades, the only ones I've had good luck with have been from SuperBrightLEDs. I can't tell you how many times I had to disassemble the whole front end of that truck to get at the stupid inaccessible headlights. I wound up upgrading the low beams, high beams, and fogs with SBL LEDs, and it made a world of difference. Pretty bright with decent cutoffs. Also, they stopped burning out. I don't recommend cheap LED headlights in general, and certainly not in difficult-to-access headlights. Good LED headlights can be very good and last much longer than the junk they sell at auto parts stores, but you have to be mindful of your cutoffs and not blinding drivers. No one likes that guy. Especially if you leveled or lifted your vehicle, you need to adjust your headlights afterwards. In this picture you can see some little Nilight LED pods I wired up to the reverse lights. They could have been brighter, especially with Florida tint, but they still had zero moisture when I sold the truck.
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The single biggest upgrade I did, though, was to add a cheapie 32" double-row LED bar to the top of the front grill. Ran a jumper from the remote to the high beams, wired up to the battery, and never even had to go through the firewall. My guess is this single mod would solve 90% of people's aux lighting needs - when it was on, the world in front of the truck turned into daylight out to 150 yards or so. Maybe not the best throw in the world, but plenty for most people doing 10mph down the trail. This can be done to virtually any vehicle, given a bit of creativity. The LED bar is way down below the hood line, so you have zero issues with glare.
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I recently put a single-row LED bar behind the grill of my Forester. It's an SBL bar, but it's not putting out all that much useful light back there. I still need to fine-tune the aim, but I suspect that it's just losing a bunch of light back behind the bumper - something to consider before hiding the LED bar behind your grill. Yes, it looks cool.
If you step up from Nilight and AuxBeam, you get to SuperBrightLEDs. SBL stuff is probably the exact same lights you get from the other manufacturers, but they seem to do their own in-house quality control. Their failure rate has been zero in my experience, and I've had their stuff on 3-4 cars now. From there, you can step it up to Rigid or Baja Designs. I went with Rigid D-Series Pros for my ditch lights.
Diode Dynamics is another name to consider. I'm running their SS3 Pro fog lights, and they're pretty amazing. Razor-sharp cutoffs and incredible brightness. If you're looking for top of the line on-road stuff, I think DD is the move. Their TIR system seems to put the most light in the boxes needed to keep them DOT legal. For offroad stuff... I'll have to try out one of their LED bars; I can't comment for now. The driving pattern on their LED bars seems very useful for rally car type things; someday I may upgrade my SBL bar to a DD bar.
No affiliation with any of these companies, btw.
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