If I was serious off road driving guy I would probably spend a grand on driving lights and buy high dollar light bars. But not all of us that own Raptors bought them for that purpose.
What I ask myself is why some people spend 70K plus on a truck. Build it to the max and then take it out and rag the shit out of it?
My answer would be.. Because they can. Same reason people put less expensive upgrades on a vehicle. Because they can and it works for them.
putting a B/D light bar behind the grill is a gigantic waste of money, no matter what anyone else tells you. You’re losing a great deal of light throw behind the grill and the B/D lights are awesome, I have several. But not behind the grille.
I love the B/D lights for distance, they rock. That said, the light color is better from my amazon sourced cheap lights. They don’t throw anywhere near as far as a B/D light bar of comparable size and I didn’t expect they would. but damn they throw an incredibly bright amount of medium dispersed, white light that is much closer in color to the factory headlights color than the B/D lights.
What B/D brings to the table is efficiency, distance, warranty, configurability and they’re freakin’ bright. Even the squadron sport / wide cornering is enough to **** off the most tolerant of on coming drivers, and the squadron pros throw light a long-freakin’-way. Also, Baja Designs lightens your wallet like no other lighting vendor out there, so you won’t have to worry about keeping a lot of cash in your wallet.
If you’re in an urban, suburban, not sand-dune-blasting at night, east coast off roading type of driving scenario, you can do fine with lower cost light options. But if you want more consistent, coherent spot beam, longer distance and want options for different lenses, then save your pennies for a couple years and if that doesn’t do it for you, then you can always do what Baja Designs told me when I asked about “easy financing terms” for their lights.
“smurf’, you can always get a paypal credit line”.
it’s your truck, it’s your choice.