The LED SAE J583 Fog Pod & Fog Light Review

FWIW, the white optics were perfectly comfortable to touch on a ‘60’s evening after ~10 minutes on. Having tested the yellow ones yet.

 

Thanks once again, @blur and good points. Product release coincides with winter in the south, though, so I don't think real world hot weather testing has occurred yet, right? I'm betting everything's safe and ultimately trust DD's thoroughness, I just have those concerns rolling around in my head. I'm planning on mounting these to an aftermarket bumper where everything is 3/16" steel, but I'd be more prone to use rubber washers where they mount rather than urethane. Rubber ~180⁰F Urethane ~130⁰F. I might even be convinced to look for heat resistant urethane washers ~230⁰F or a fibrous washer made for exhaust. Warning - melting temps have been snapped up rapidly off the Google!

 

Hey guys, I’ve owned Toyotas in the past and loved them, but I’m currently driving a Ford Raptor. I joined this forum because of this great thread and I wanted to give a little feedback.

Right now I have 3 pairs Diode Dynamics lights in my front bumper, all in the front bumper fog pockets. One pair of white sport driving, one pair of max yellow fog, and one pair of sport yellow fog. The max fogs are aimed directly forward, and the sport fogs are aimed 35° to the right and left to provide extra cornering light in my dark neighborhood. I actually just got the max’s from one of your vendors, memario1214 at HotShot Offroad, who’s been awesome to deal with.

I live in Utah and commute 40 miles from Utah Valley up through Salt Lake City to the International airport. I go to work at 5am and then I drive home around 8pm, so most of my winter driving is also in the dark. From my observations so far I can tell you the Sports will probably NOT be helpful in anything other than fog and rain. If there's any light snow or slush the sports will ice over and get blocked because they simply don’t run hot enough. I drove through a light snow storm before I got the pair of max’s, and the sports were completely blocked within 5 minutes.

I just got the max's a couple weeks ago and we're having an extremely bad snow year, so I haven’t had a chance to run them in a good snow storm yet. However, I did take some temperature readings with my IR thermometer the past few mornings and here’s what I found.

First Morning:
• I idled my truck with the fog lights on to warm them up for 8 minutes. After 8 minutes the air temp was 44°F, the sport yellow lenses were 68°F, and the max yellow lenses were 96°F. This was just sitting at idle with no airflow.
• After my 40 minute commute, mostly at 74 mph, I immediately got out and took another reading. The air temp was 38°F, the sport yellow lenses were 44°F, and the max yellow lenses were 80°F. This was with no snow or rain, just the airflow from driving.

Second Morning:
• Truck idled with the fog lights on for 15 minutes, after 15 minutes the air temp was 36°F, the sport yellow lenses were 72°F, and the max yellow lenses were 115°F. This was just sitting at idle with no airflow.
• After my 40 minute commute, mostly at 78 mph, I got these numbers. Air temp was 28°F, the sport yellow lenses were 36°F, and the max yellow lenses were 70°F. This was again with no snow or rain, just the airflow from driving.

I’m going to try to take some good photographs this weekend, and I’ll update you guys when I take the max yellow fog lights into a storm. Also, keep in mind my bumper pockets are big and wide open, so my lights get a good amount of airflow around them.

 

I'm going to end up with a very similar config - extremely similar! I'm beginning to think @crashnburn80 and @memario1214 are twin angels sent from above, or at least the top of Pike's Peak . Your temperature numbers are vastly different than Crash's and all I can think is those "heat sink"-style bodies must be incredibly effective or Crash keeps his garage at 120⁰F with no airflow.

 

Keep in mind, the bottom of the light mount where it would bolt to the bumper is a pretty long way from the heat source, I wouldn't be concerned. Why would you not be using a standard stainless washer on the bottom of the mount if you wanted to have a washer?

Welcome!

Good point on the fog bumper openings allowing more airflow. As an FYI, the Max takes about 30 minutes to get up to full temp, it will get hot quick though, but takes 30 minutes to reach peak heat.

LOL! I do heat my garage, but not that warm! It is typically around 60 degrees, I often note the ambient temp for the readings. IR guns are not as precise for locating the peak temp, so there would be some delta there, plus the 32 degree ambient temp difference and the cooling air flow especially with the Raptor fog opening, so I'm not surprised the numbers are significantly different.

Max at ~60 degrees ambient

 

I was thinking bolting the pods to an all steel bumper bolted directly to the frame could benefit from some degree of vibration dampening.

 

cool thing about LEDs. they don't suffer from vibrations.

 

As mentioned above, the solid state lights are not affected by vibration, so no need to worry about dampening.

 

Well, there I go old schoolin’ stuff again. “Step away from the project, dude... just step away...”

 

I finally was able to do a legit night drive with the DD SS3 MAX tonight.

Skip to the TLDR tag to go straight to the worthwhile part.

Some background you can skip if you aren’t interested. We live in Encinitas and my wife’s dad has a second home in Palm Desert. If you’ve seen Something About Mary, his place is the west coast equivalent. Lots of old people living out retirement. Perfect for small children. Flat and safe. Anyway, we do the drive every week or two outside of summer when it’s too hot. It takes 2.5 ish hours with a short stop and it’s just over 100 miles. We usually arrive near 9pm. There are two major routes, all freeway or highway 74 which goes up to 4000’ and over the San Jacinto mountains. The freeway route is usually a little slower, definitely longer, and has plenty of traffic. Lately it’s had some significant construction as well. It’s not miserable but it’s not fun. I prefer the more direct and desolate route on highway 74.

The vehicle we use is a 2018 Honda Odyssey because happy wife happy life. It’s a better family hauler than the Tacoma. And it’s not constantly midway through some mod like my Tacoma

I did the night drive on 74 once with stock headlights and it wasn’t what I would call safe. There are several low speed turns and a few serious drop offs, though the guard rails have recently been replaced / improved. I felt with stock bulbs that driver workload on the most challenging portion, which is around 90-100 minutes into the drive, was significant to the point of dangerous. Crash hooked me up with some bulb recommendations and some HIR Hugh beams which made subsequent drives substantially easier and safer. However, one exception remained, a set of switchbacks descending to the desert floor. The problem there is that even awesome high beams don’t help as all the light blasts up where it doesn’t really help illuminate the roadway. You also have very short notice of an approaching driver so manual high/low switching just adds more to the already high workload. Auto high beams really suck on this stretch. Meanwhile, keeping the vehicle in the center of the lane and trying to smooth curves and adjust speed is already plenty challenging in daylight. But the H9’s in halogen projectors just didn’t really seem like enough to feel confident. You can only see about 100 meters before the next turn at any given point. It’s easy to blow it on a turn by entering or exiting at the wrong angle and being forced to brake or over correct, neither of which are appreciated by the co pilot.

My wife gets very nauseous when not driving. She also gets very tired at 8pm. It’s a challenging combination and explains the majority of the importance I have given to this specific drive. We could go during the day but then I’m missing work for no good reason. At night the kids fall asleep and it’s a very low stress bedtime routine.

This specific section of road was what I bought the MAX fog lights for. The thing is, I can’t just go super slow because that’s not going to be acceptable to the co pilot, but if I don’t keep it smooth I hear escalating sounds of distress. It can get legitimately intense. She will for sure do the driving on the return leg during daylight. But she would rather not drive at night in the dark.

TLDR, the MAX really shone bright just as I hoped it might. The difference in visibility actually exceeded my rather high expectations. On urban streets near our house the MAX fog lights are relatively useless, there is just too much light pollution and no need for them at all. But on a twisty mountain descent they gave a massively better view of the road than the H9’s in my low beam projectors.

This is a very specific section of road and of course not what these lights were primarily designed for. But it just happens to be a rather fantastic combination, particularly in 6000k. I was rather meh on them before tonight but now I’m satisfied about the decision because we will likely do this drive dozens of times a year.

They are mounted low and aimed low if anything but the only remaining concern I have with them is impact to approaching drivers. I’d like to know what it’s like when approaching while ascending before I feel completely ok with leaving them on during this stretch. I didn’t get flashed but that’s not a scientific measurement

 

If you have another vehicle, have your spouse or friend drive the 4runner opposing you so you get a firsthand look.

I love how they light up the entire freeway wide so folks with poor lights can actually see

 

That would be cool, but isn’t remotely possible with my life configuration. The section of road is a solid 20+ minutes away and the turns come quick. Multiple passes would be needed to get a decent feel and the turnouts are top and bottom. It’d be a couple of hours of purely recreational driving while at night. We don’t even have a spare 20 minutes to talk to each other as adults without the kids awake and bugging us.

Here is a YouTube of the road taken during the day. It’s part of the CA pine to palms highway. Some friends ride up/down on bicycles to/from San Diego but I never have. At night it’s a unique experience. The desert floor below is lit up but far away, a bit like the views of Honolulu when flying in/out at night. The curves vary and some are rather tight. The road is narrow and mostly no shoulder or passing lane. And it’s gotta be 3000’ of vertical.

Near the top it has been foggy on one of our trips. Not too bad but enough that I felt almost justified by the purchase. Hitting dense fog at night on the descent would be quite the experience.

 

The Pro and Max meet the federal guidelines for fog lights, and if installed and aimed correctly should not bother other drivers. Unless you live somewhere that is always foggy, or out in the sticks where you're worried about deer and other critters, why are you using fog lights every day?

 

Is that a fact? I must have defective lamps then. Went through 3 LED’s on the bench grinder in a week. Replaced with Rough Service incandescent & no problem in over a month. Go figure.

 

Well, within reason yes. Not sure what the case is on your bench grinder with the LED bulbs though. In an incandescent/halogen filament light, the filament is fragile and gets brittle over time, heavy vibration can cause the filament to break and fail. In the case of a rough service duty bulb, the filaments are thicker and stronger to better resist breaking in heavy vibration environments.

 

Yeah then you'll probably be pretty happy. I really like having the sports providing the extra light to the sides. My max's are aimed with a 4" drop at 25', and the side shooting sports are a 5" drop at 25'. I actually had my wife sit in her car in a big parking lot right after I aimed these. Her car is a very low to the ground 2007 BMW M Coupe, and then I drove a couple runs towards her from the opposite side. She said it wasn't blinding at all as I did runs both straight and with sweeping turns to check the angles. In one spot there was one large hump that I could hit and it would temporarily bounce my front end high. When I did that she said the yellow was just as bright as my factory LED low beams when the cutoffs went up into the air, but the yellow wasn't as bad to look at as the white from the low beams.

Exactly, there was a big difference between what we did and I didn't expect to match your numbers. My numbers started with everything cold soaked outside overnight while trying to warm up in cold ambient air, and then I started driving before it could hit peak temps. The first 6 minutes of my drive are on 25-45 mph roads, then it's a solid 32 minutes on the Interstate at 74 mph right up to the airport. I didn't wait 30 minutes for them to warm up more because I never idle my truck that long. On cold mornings I hit the remote start on my truck while I make my coffee, and then an auto shutdown kicks in at 15 minutes if I take too long. I'm usually out the door in 8-10 minutes after I start it and I just took these readings wondering what to expect from my lights in real cold weather use.

Also, we finally got a little bit of snow in the valleys while I'm home. I got back from a reserve flight around 1pm today and it was coming down on my way home. It wasn't sticking to the ground anywhere, and still isn't at 3:30pm now, but it did pack on the front of my truck a bit.

Here's a grab from my dashcam of the driving conditions:



After my drive home here's what my front end looked like. If this was a night drive the low beams wouldn't be doing anything for me. The low beams were on the entire drive but there's just no heat from these, which is why I hate LED headlights in the winter:





Here's how the fog lights did, this time the sports managed to stay clean. It probably helps that I recessed them a little more and angled them to the side. They don't get a direct hit by the snow. The white driving lights were left off and you can see how much packed onto them.





So there you go, if I was driving this truck at night in this storm, the fog lights would be the only thing left still throwing light down the road.

 

Great real world driving stuff there and it’s great to know someone is being conscientious enough to test things out blinding other drivers. Thank you!

It looks like you put the Sport side throws on the inside mounts - I was thinking about my side throws going on the outside to lessen the angles. Was going to put my MAX fogs on the inside mount positions. Six of one, half a dozen, I suppose with them being so close together anyway.

Before I cement that decision, is there a design reason to put the side throws on the inside mounts or did you just end up doing it that way? Not picking on your decision, just making sure I’m not missing an element in my layout design.

 

Great post showing cold weather de-icing performance! Cold weather performance and the ability to de-ice is very important to me as someone who often drives across snowy mountain passes at night. A good light is worthless if it ices over in the conditions it needs to perform in, that is one of the great features of the SS3 Pro/Max for use in poor cold weather conditions. For headlights, this is specifically why I installed heated JW Speaker J3s on my Gladiator instead of the OEM LED headlights in combination with the SS3s. A truck should be able to handle any conditions thrown at it, and to have your lighting be defeated by snow at night is just unacceptable.

OEM vs Heated JW J3 + SS3 Pro


OEM vs heated JW J3s

 

What a difference in temps on those headlights! We get a little snow out here, but we get ice and this has happened countless times to our cars. I just assumed all headlights ice up and that’s how it is, until I got on this thread.

Great help, @Hahn Solo and @crashnburn80 !