Every hunter, camper, or overlander who’s ever rolled onto a forest service road after the sun dropped knows the feeling: headlights on the side-by-side or truck barely push past the hood, and everything beyond that is just black nothing. You creep along at twenty miles an hour, white-knuckled, praying the next rut doesn’t swallow a wheel or send you over an edge you never saw coming. Deer, bears, downed trees—they all wait until the worst possible moment to appear. A good set of auxiliary lights isn’t a luxury out there; it’s the difference between getting camp set up in the dark and getting home in an ambulance.
Rigid Industries just threw a new player into the ring that might change the game for a lot of us. They call it the Phoenix line, and the big promise is simple: one family of lights that can be almost anything you need them to be.
Image credit: Rigid Industries
Start with the basics. You can buy them as single round pods—either 5-inch or a bigger 7-inch XL version—or you can get the Phoenix Connect system, which is essentially a plug-and-play light bar already wired up and ready to bolt on. The Connect bars come in 30, 40, or 50-inch lengths, so whether you’re lighting up a full-size truck bumper or just need something clean across the roof of a Talon or Can-Am, they’ve got a size that fits without looking like an afterthought.
Brightness is where a lot of guys stop shopping, and these don’t disappoint. The regular 5-inch pods put out 10,167 raw lumens each. Step up to the 7-inch XL pods and you’re looking at 14,290 lumens per pod. For reference, that’s enough light to turn pitch-black desert into something that feels like late afternoon. The factory pre-wired Connect bars use the 5-inch pods, so even the “small” bar is stupid bright.
What really sets the Phoenix apart, though, is how many ways you can tweak it without buying a whole new light. Rigid built in a five-mode color switch—pure white, two warmer whites, and two amber settings. One push of a button on the dash and you can go from blasting clean white light on an open fire road to cutting through thick dust with amber when the group ahead of you is kicking up half the trail. Any guy who’s chased a convoy through Glamis or ran the Mojave Road at midnight knows exactly why that matters. Dust reflects white light straight back into your eyes and blinds you. Amber punches through it. Having both in the same housing is a legit advantage.
They also gave you three separate power levels. Run them wide open when you’re alone on a trail and need to see every rock and washout. Drop them down a notch or two when you’re in a group and don’t want to roast the guy in front of you, or when you’re just idling around camp and want to save the battery on the rig.
Beam pattern choices are there too. Out of the box they ship with spot lenses, which throw light a country mile down the trail—perfect for high-speed runs across open land. But Rigid will sell drive and combo lenses separately if you want more width close-in for technical crawling or forest roads where stuff jumps out from the sides.
Mounting is the other area where they went out of their way to make life easy. The pods themselves have the usual side and bottom mounts, but the Connect bars come pre-wired with quick-disconnect plugs, so the entire bar can come off in minutes if you need to pull it for a rooftop tent or just don’t want it on the truck for daily driving.
All of this is coming sometime in 2026. Rigid hasn’t dropped exact shipping dates yet, but everything we’ve seen says these will be on shelves and ready to bolt on next year.
Image credit: Rigid Industries
For a lot of us who’ve bolted on light bars in the past and then wished six months later we’d bought something wider, brighter, or with a different color, the Phoenix setup feels like the first time a company actually thought about how we really use these things. Instead of buying one bar for desert runs and another set of pods for the deer woods, you might finally be able to build exactly what you need and then change it next season without starting over.
Night runs aren’t going away. Neither are dust clouds, rutted-out two-tracks, or critters that only move after dark. If the Phoenix lights live up to what Rigid is promising on paper, a bunch of us are going to be rolling into camp a lot later—and a whole lot safer—next year.
