Baja Designs Finally Releases Light Performance Data…It’s Not Great

Vol. 18

Nothing gets a journalist worked up like a lie. Those lies can be outright (“I am not a crook!”), but they can also come through omission, or obfuscation. 

For the first time ever, mega-popular lighting brand Baja Designs has released actual performance numbers for some of its products. Again for the first time ever, this allows us to compare the performance of its lights to rivals. 

The industry standard performance metric for driving lights is the distance at which they can project 1 lux of illumination. This comes from Australia, where driving lights are widely understood to be an important safety feature for people driving through remote areas at night. Both the Australian government, and its state governments impose various regulations on how those lights can be designed and used. And that country also enforces strict truth in advertising laws. 

Is BD providing consumers with that 1 lux distance, so they can easily compare the performance of its lights to rival brands? 

“Traditionally the off-road lighting industry has measured distance where the light dims to 1 or .25 lux which allows distance values to be exaggerated but in reality, are too dim to safely drive off,” Baja Designs writes in the white paper through which it's releasing performance data. “By choosing such a low intensity of light other off-road lighting manufacturers can claim unrealistically long-distance measurements for their lights.”

The company instead decides to quote distance at 10 lux for its lights, “Because it is roughly equivalent to the amount of light present at twilight making it a more realistic minimum amount of light the human eye can safely use for driving.”

This is a clever obfuscation. 10 lux is more light than 1 lux, Baja Designs must be m0ar better!!!1!

Let’s play this out, on BD’s terms. The brand’s flagship driving light, the one that, according to its own data, projects light the furthest, is the LP9 Pro Spot. BD says one of those can push 10 lux out to 778 feet. 

I grabbed this list of performance metrics for BD’s spotlights, in order to present the performance of its products in the most flattering possible way. You can find numbers for their other products here.

How does that stack up to other lights? Most quality brands don’t use that 10 lux distance, and quote performance for pairs of lights, since driving lights are designed to be used in pairs. But, ARB does happen to provide these numbers. A single ARB Solis 36 spot provides 10 lux at 1,069.6 feet. A pair of Solis 36s, complete with the necessary wiring harness, retails for $723. A pair of LP9 Pros with a harness is $1,294. 

The point of that 1 lux standard is not, as Baja Designs explicitly claims, to exaggerate performance, but rather to offer a simple, easily understood point of comparison. Choosing 10 instead of 1 is completely arbitrary, and is being done here only to make comparing BDs lights to others a challenge. 

The white paper explains, “The inverse square law states that the intensity of light drops with the inverse square of the distance.” Choosing a point along a light’s beam doesn’t indicate that light is more powerful than another at that distance, it’s just a point closer to the light. 

Fortunately, the brand itself provides us with easy formula by which we can compare its unique 10 lux distance to the standard 1 lux. “Calculating to 1 lux gives a distance 3.16 times greater than if measured or calculated to 10 lux,” explains BD’s white paper. 

778 x 3.16 = 2,455.3 

Again, that’s for a single light, and most quality brands quote performance for a pair of lights. But also again, ARB is kind enough to provide data for single lights. A single ARB Solis 21 spot projects 1 lux at 2,739 feet. A pair of Solis 21s, with a harness, goes for $525. 

Illumination distance provides a good point of comparison for consumers because the purpose of driving lights is to increase the amount of reaction time a driver has to respond to a hazard. Obviously real world stuff like environmental conditions (fog, rain, snow, dust, etc), and curves or hills can limit this distance. Still, that 1 lux distance provides an easy way to understand how much reaction time a light can provide. The stock high beams on your car or truck probably reach 250 to 350 feet. Traveling at 65 MPH, 350 feet of illumination is enough to provide 3.6 seconds of reaction time. Installing driving lights capable of reaching twice that distance—700 feet—will increase your reaction time at 65 MPH to 7.3 seconds. The more reaction time you have, the less consequential a given hazard will prove. 

Regardless of what we decide is an effective amount of light “to drive off,” all you have to do to determine reaction time is to plug the distance at which that amount of light is achieved in a time = distance/speed calculation. Let’s again use BD’s 10 lux number. A single LP9 Pro Spot will give you 8 seconds of reaction time at 65 MPH. A single ARB 36 spot gives you over 11 seconds. 

BD addresses the reaction time thing in the white paper, declaring that 4 seconds is the target it uses when selecting lighting setups for desert racers. “This is the time required for a driver to recognize an obstacle, perceive the object, and to begin to react,” BD writes. “An additional three seconds is used as a period for the driver to plan and execute maneuvers around the obstacle.”

This leads us to a question I frequently get from friends who have drunk the inefficient, overpriced lighting kool aid: “How often do you find yourself out-driving your lights?” The insinuation is that, while other brands may offer (much) higher performance, you just don’t need it in the real world. 

Desert racing typically occurs on closed courses which competitors have the opportunity to drive before the race. That allows them to assemble detailed course notes, which then provide them with turn-by-turn guidance on gear selection, and which direction a given corner might turn. This process is specifically designed to allow drivers to maintain competitive speeds even in situations where visibility is limited. While top speeds for the fastest vehicles in races like the Baja 1000 and Best in the Desert may occasionally reach 120 MPH, averages speeds are far lower. Baja Designs itself pegs the average speed for competitive vehicles across all classes that enter those two races at 47.3 MPH. Racing is a sport in which competitors pursue peak physical condition, enabling them to maintain a superhuman level of concentration. And even with all the above working in their favor, crashes remain common.

Does any of that sounds like your average nighttime drive? The entire point of running driving lights is to turn what would otherwise be a white knuckle experience into something through which you can relax, while maintaining as much safety as possible. Average road speeds often far exceed those experienced by desert racers, and real world hazards from deer, to fallen rocks, are innumerable and ever changing. The more reaction time you have, the more relaxing and safe nighttime driving will be. Full stop. 

Baja Designs is releasing these light performance numbers as part of a marketing campaign around something they’re calling “Effective Lighting Score,” which claims to combine several metrics to determine a light’s real world efficacy. 

“While competitors claim their lights project further, the main difference between Baja Designs and the competition is that we prioritize Blend Angle and Blendability over distance,” claims the brand. 

What are Blend Angle, and Blendability? This is getting long, so I’m just going to cut to the chase: they’re a pile of horseshit that attempts to further obfuscate actual performance metrics. “Blend Angle” is just a term for beam angle. “Blendability,” apparently refers to a light pattern that’s free of shadows and artifacts. You’ll find beam angle numbers listed by any quality light brand, and any quality driving light should produce an even spread of light. 

I feel like the conclusion here can be summed up really simply. The most expensive, powerful, furthest reaching, gee whiz light that Baja Designs produces—the 9-inch LP9 Pro Spot—is not capable of competing with even the budget 6-inch options offered by quality competitors. There’s a reason they’ve been lying to you.

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A post shared by Wes Siler (@wessiler)

As an aside, I drove behind a set of Solis 21s for the first time last night. Both my vehicles are in the shop this week, and my buddy Connor was generous enough to loan me his wife’s 4Runner. He and I just installed those lights on a hidden mount behind the 4Runner’s grill. They’re the ideal combination of a single spot in front of the driver, and a flood on the passenger side, providing 1 lux @ 3,346 feet. Visibility was a good mix of wide, evenly dispersed close and mid-distance light illuminating a big swath of the roadside, while the spot beam punched impressively far into the distance. At $525, a pair of these things just can’t be beat. That pair of ARB Solis 21s is my recommendation for any driver on a budget, while a $1,300 pair of Lightforce HTX2s (1 lux @ 5,905 feet, pictured above) remains the highest performing option out there.