Ditch lights

Also called auxiliary lights, aux lights, A-pillar lights, pillar lights, cowl lights, hood lights

Ditch lights are auxiliary lights mounted at the hood corners or the base of the A-pillars and aimed outward, so they light the verges, the ditch and the inside of a turn where your headlights do not reach.

What are ditch lights for?

The name is literal. They light the ditch: the shoulder, the verge, the drop-off you are about to put a wheel into, and the animal standing just outside your headlight beam waiting to step in front of you. They are peripheral vision, not reach.

The industry calls this function cornering lighting, and Baja Designs number it Zone 2. The community calls them ditch lights by a factor of twenty-five to one, which is why that is the name on this entry.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Treating them as extra headlights and aiming them straight ahead. Mounted at the hood corners, a wide beam pointed forward lights the hood before it lights anything useful, and a large painted panel two feet from your face is an efficient way to fatigue your own eyes. In dust or snow it also lights the air directly in front of the windscreen, which is the worst place for lit air to be.

Aiming them outward fixes both at once. The hood leaves the beam, and the brightly lit near air leaves the corridor you are looking down. Baja Designs' own guidance for a wide pattern on the A-pillar carries exactly that exception: not unless they are angled outward.

What they are not good at

Fog and dust. The A-pillar and hood corner positions sit close to eye height, which is where a wide beam does the most harm when the air is full of something. The lamp for that job is a low, wide, sharply cut-off light on the bumper, which is a different zone with different mounting.

They are also a poor substitute for reach. For fast open running you want a tight long-range beam mounted high, and a ditch light is the opposite of that in both respects.