Going off-road is one of our favorite pastimes. We love the adventure and freedom of exploring the great outdoors and on occasion, pushing our vehicle to its limits. More often than not, we find ourselves burning every last bit of daylight while we're out there, and once we've exceeded the sun’s reach, we're at the mercy of whatever lighting our 4x4 happens to be equipped with.
On our 2013 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon, we've found that the stock headlights leave plenty to be desired. The short reach and yellow-ish tinge of the light often make for a less than stellar nighttime ‘wheeling experience. When we upgraded our JK with an ARB stubby series front bumper, one of the options we were excited to go for was ARB’s AR21 LED lights. Since the AR21s demand little from the electrical system and project a tremendous amount of light, they made perfect sense for our setup.
Given our JK was fit with ARB’s front bumper lighting mounts, the AR21 brackets fit perfectly in place. Three bolts hold the lighting bracket to the bumper to ensure it won’t rattle loose. To provide user-friendly tilt adjustments, each light has tamper-proof pivot adjusters. These not only make sure the lights stay aimed correctly, but reduces the chances of would-be-thieves easily making off with your lights.
The AR21 Intensity LED light is a 7"-round light that houses 21 individual LED lights. The high-pressure, A360 cast-aluminum housing is fit with a polycarbonate lens and UV-stable polycarbonate lens cover. This allows the lights to handle everything from tree branches to rock chips without issue.
To make wiring as simple as possible, we picked up ARB’s Intensity Wire Loom kit (part number 3500520). This setup includes sealed connectors, switch and plenty of loomed wire to cleanly route the harness in the engine bay.
There are a few options for how you can wire up your light switch. We choose to tap into one of the unused fuse locations in our JK’s TIPM fuse box.
Since the included lighting switch came with an adhesive back, we opted to place it atop the steering column for now. If we decide to add on more lighting down the right, we may look into a larger integrated switch panel, such as the ones from Painless and sPOD.
This gives you a pretty good idea at how bad our stock JK lights are at night; this is low beam only.
Here’s the same spot with our dual AR21s powered on. The light reach is not only significantly longer, but offers a purer white light as well.
ARB offers the AR21 in either a spot or flood version, and we chose to go with one of each. The idea behind having a spot beam on the driver's side and a flood on the passenger is to give you both that long-distance visibility that you need, while maintaining a wide view for things that are a bit closer. Overall, we're extremely happy with the AR21s. While they are a touch on the pricey side, the performance and quality seem to back the price point.
