What this site is
Better Automotive Lighting (BAL) is a publication about vehicle lighting: how it works, how to upgrade it, how to install it, and how to do it legally and safely. We write for owners doing the work themselves and for anyone trying to make sense of lumen claims, bulb sizes and beam patterns before they spend money. We also cover industry news, new products, regulations, and anything else in the always-evolving world of aftermarket automotive lighting.
Who owns it, and why we tell you
BAL is owned by Driven Lighting Group (DLG), an Atlanta, Georgia company. DLG also owns the Headlight Revolution, The Retrofit Source and Morimoto Lighting stores, among others.
That gives us two things most lighting sites do not have: a workshop full of vehicles, housings and test equipment, and daily contact with the engineers who design the products. It also gives us a commercial interest. Our rules for handling that:
- Articles that feature DLG products say so in the article.
- Comparisons include competitors’ products, tested the same way.
- We do not take payment, free products in exchange for coverage, or affiliate commissions from other sellers.
- Links to DLG stores are there so you can buy what we tested, and they are labeled as our stores. We also link to the brand owners of products and topics we cover that are not part of our portfolio.
How we test
Headlight housings in our shootouts are measured with the Morimoto multi-point testing method, developed by Morimoto Lighting’s housing designer Yoshi Yoshida and used across the Driven Lighting Group brands. We say that plainly: Morimoto and this site share an owner. The method exists because the industry got used to judging headlights by how the beam looks on a wall, and headlights are designed to light a road, not a wall.
Here is what actually happens on the test bench:
- One fixed benchmark. Every housing is tested as a driver-side unit, mounted at 0.85 meters from the floor and aimed at a wall, so a Corvette headlight and a lifted Bronco headlight are compared on the same terms.
- Aim first. A laser level sets the horizontal and vertical reference. Low beam sets the vertical aim from the cutoff; high beam is checked against the center of the vertical axis. If the aim is wrong, the numbers are wrong, so nothing is recorded until it is right.
- Eight points, not one. Federal regulation defines 23 measurement points. We use the eight that decide how a headlight behaves on the road, read by eight digital lux meters on the wall: points 1 and 2 for distance on your side and the oncoming side, 3 and 4 for comfort in the midfield and to the sides, 5 and 6 for width in the distance and the near field (low beam), and point 7 plus the HV center and point 8 (foreground) for high beam. A hot-spot reading alone says nothing about width or balance.
- Lux to candela, wall to road. Wall readings are converted from lux to candela and translated onto a 3D road surface. That road mapping, not the wall picture, is what the comparison is built on.
- Balance is scored, not just brightness. Foreground that is too bright relative to the distance zone makes your eyes close down and costs you distance vision, so the distance-to-foreground and foreground-to-mid ratios count against a housing that floods the ground in front of the bumper. High beam is scored against the regulated 40,000 to 75,000 candela window at the HV point; above the maximum the score stops improving because glare risk rises.
- Compliance is checked. Every one of the eight points has a regulated minimum and maximum. A housing that is not DOT compliant is reported as such, whatever its numbers.
- Photographed and checked by a third party. Each housing is photographed on the wall, the readings and photos go to Yoshi for scoring, and the results are also tested by a third party before a shootout is published.
Two things this method is not. It is not a bulb test: putting an LED bulb in a stock housing is a different question with a different procedure, and we label those articles separately. And a score is a summary of the chosen points, not a rank by brightness: two housings can earn the same score one way through exceptional distance and another through overall balance, so read the beam analysis, not just the number. Where an older article predates this method, it says so.
Who writes here
John Tobias is the author of Better Automotive Lighting articles and has been involved in the automotive aftermarket lighting industry for over ten years. While working for various lighting brands, John has worked in customer service, marketing, and pricing and category management. He engages with customers and enthusiasts at events, does constant competitor and industry research, and is one of the foremost aftermarket lighting industry voices in the USA.
Meet the people behind Better Automotive Lighting
John Tobias, Headlight Junkie and Industry Veteran
Before managing pricing and product categories for the DLG brands, John worked directly with customers in customer service and tech support, then spent several years in marketing creating content like this and the videos published online. Today he takes more than ten years of aftermarket automotive lighting experience to events all over the USA, meeting customers and talking to real people about what they care about. He is focused on understanding the market, the trends, the big players, and what matters to lighting enthusiasts. John has tested thousands of lights, works directly with lighting engineers to evaluate the technical performance behind every recommendation, and is one of the foremost experts on everything happening in the world of aftermarket automotive lighting. LinkedIn
History
betterautomotivelighting.com has been online since 2012. Older articles are being updated to our current standard; where the original test photography no longer exists, we say so in the article rather than describe tests we cannot show.
Contact
Facebook: facebook.com/BetterAutomotiveLighting
Business: Driven Lighting Group, Atlanta, GA 30318