UKCRD

I recently cracked one of my JK headlight lens. They were Cibie upgraded ones, which I liked a lot but I decided it was time to try out some LED ones. A search of the market place, however, was about as confusing as it can be.. :crazy eyes:

Trucklite, KC, JW Speaker to name but a few all have headlights in the $600+ range. A couple of other companies, one a sponsor here, has near identical lights to JWS (and well reviewed) at half that price. I'm fairly sure all these units, regardless of the brand, are produced and imported from China. Then you head into the unbranded market where apparently, identical or near identical units can be purchased for $100-$200.

Now I'm a big advocate of supporting companies that spend 100s of thousands on R&D and consequently put out a unique and high quality product. If they're then produced in that country all the better and I'll normally spend the extra bucks to purchase them, pay the extortionate shipping and customs charges to the UK (that normally doubles the ticket price) and fit them to my Jeep in the knowledge that I've backed one of "our" US manufacturers and that I have a higher quality part on my Jeep than if I'd purchased a "knock-off" or "counterfeit".

With lights, however, the waters appear muddied. Most of the US branded lights are manufactured in China but are they manufactured by the same factories that also sell the "copies" to vendors who then sell them unbranded? Are the lights not just identical in appearance and specs but also identical in quality? IOW, are they actually the same lights or maybe ones who's specs have been slightly altered in order to declare them "different" and thereby allow their sale unbranded instead of exclusively to a given US company?

Now I'm not accusing anyone or any company of anything, since I have no evidence one way or another but I certainly don't wish to pay $800 for a set of lights that I can buy for $150 that only lack a branding tag..

I've personally purchased US branded products from a well known US company and supplier of Jeep parts that has long been a sponsor on this forum and I quickly took the decision to not have a single component on my Jeep from that company after the first 3 failed miserably and turned out to be utter garbage. I do know for a fact that virtually all (if not all) their products do indeed originate from China and are sold with hefty markups under their US based logo.

So I wonder what the deal is with lights. I've personally decided to test out a set of $200 headlights, unbranded, and see for myself. I have thousands of dollars worth of US branded lights on my JK as I speak so it will be interesting to see the difference (if any) in quality that the extra $500 affords me.. or maybe I'll find out that I've been mugged off once again with good marketing and by my sense of loyalty and moral compass with regards to "copies".

Interested to hear the views of others.

Carbon

I just stick with the basics man. Stock lights & KC non LED spotlights on hood if I ever need them. I rarely drive at night anyway. Hell I would run old timer oil burning head lamps if I had some.Low & Slow. lol

UKCRD

LOL! I hear ya! I'm a light addict and unashamed, which is why this particular debate interests me.

mr72

You won't get a straight answer on this from anybody, and a bunch of misguided Americans might get into a big discussion having to do with morality of buying overseas-manufactured stuff or intellectual property rights or labor economics, all of which they likely don't understand.

As a practical matter, what you already stated is most likely absolutely true. The lights you buy direct from a manufacturer on alibaba.com for $150 are identical in every way to the ones you buy on Amazon for $300 and the ones you buy with "JW Speaker" or "KC" brand names from Quadratec for $600. They may well be identical down to the place of manufacture and the actual hands of human beings and machines that are used to make them from identical parts supply. What they lack is the "support" of a US company, which means customer service employees living in the USA (and having to be paid USA wages) and the other business overhead of operating a company in the USA, all of which inflates the cost. It also might add some value. You know, you buy a $600 pair of lights and on the chance one of them is broken or damaged or defective maybe the USA company will deliver you another one in a timely fashion while if you buy them from alibaba.com with 6 weeks shipping time for $150 when one is defective you have to just cough up another $150 and wait another six weeks, rolling the dice.

The USA-based "manufacturer" (vendor, really... or OEM) is almost definitely getting their product from a contract manufacturer in China or wherever else (Mexico, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, etc..) and unless they are idiots then they are also leveraging the CM's engineering to help design a product, most likely just purely contracting to have a design done to their specification, one which can be manufactured and shipped reliably with a healthy profit margin. The CM then offers the very same product that they have themselves designed, even under the advice of some American OEM, direct to customers without things like branding, retail packaging, or offering through a common industry storefront like Quadratec.

And truly to those of you who think buying from an American company means you are keeping jobs in America, suffice to say a) those manufacturing jobs are still being done in China even if you buy from an American company and b) you don't want Americans to have to work for the wages that Chinese manufacturing workers can live on anyway. If that JW speaker light set was manufactured in the USA then both the quality would be far lower and also it would cost 5x as much as it already does. You really want to pay $3K for a substandard set of lights? I mean, the ones you are replacing were manufactured right here by union-wage Americans. so c) your American company would go out of business or not exist to begin with if we forced all labor to be done in the USA. But truly you are paying more for something so some Americans can have jobs. The Americans who order the manufactured goods from China and then have it drop-shipped to Quadratec, or put them in their local warehouse, the American warehouse workers, the American CS reps who ship you stuff from the local warehouse, and of course the managers and the business owner who had the idea to import Chinese lights, put a shiny USA-flag label on them and charge Jeepers 4x as much for them is the one you are really paying. So you are keeping some jobs in America, jobs that don't need to be done at all if you buy direct from the manufacture like the middleman does.

IMHO buy from China directly with a clear conscience, but be prepared that your customer service experience is likely to be kind of nutty... potentially you don't get what you ordered, there's no instructions or missing parts you have to figure out, instructions are in Chinese as is the customer service, if you can actually talk to them, which you probably can't, etc. I mean, you are basically taking on the role of the OEM, potentially not armed with nearly the same information.

FWIW there's someone here in Austin who buys these so-called "knockoff" lights direct from Alibaba and then resells them on craigslist for nominally more than he pays, which is kind of a really lightweight middleman. This truly is how these businesses get started. One day when he's selling 100 lights a month, he'll likely start branding them, raise the prices, write his own instructions, package them with whatever wiring harnesses are needed and anti-flicker and that kind of thing, find a way to adapt them to motorcycles and TJs and on and on... this is how modern American business is born. Eventually he has a small Austin warehouse (maybe just his garage) and one or two employees (wife and kids) and starts shipping product to Quadratec and 4WP.

TOTL Innovations

According to their website J.W. Speaker "proudly design, manufacture & assemble our products in Germantown, Wisconsin"
http://www.jwspeaker.com/about/

I would assume they get alot of the raw parts from China simply because unfortunately there just arent many other manufacturers of stuff like this anymore but they would face some serious penalties if the products were completely made there and they said otherwise.

The Chinese are extremely good at reverse engineering. The second a U.S. company comes out with a product, someone here sends a couple over to whoever they work for in China. The product is disassembled and they start to figure out who sourced everything. Then its just a matter of time before a cheap Chinese knock off is made and saddest of all, the culture and legal system is completely behind this practice.

Lastly, have you seen the price Marcus gets on these:
https://www.jk-forum.com/forums/show...=1#post4239527

karls10jk

The Chinese knock-off's do look great and they do look identical to the name brand lights. I think where you'll find the difference (aside from customer support) is going to be the light cutoff and intensity.

I had Chinese hid headlights for a short period of time and they were absolutely brighter than any other headlight on the market. It would take multiple lights to compensate for this pair of lights. The issue though- they sprayed light everywhere. It wasn't focused, it had zero cutoff, and was unruly.

I have also fallen victim to the guy who buys the Chinese parts and builds light bars in his garage, claiming "made in 'Murica". It worked well for a little while but then it failed and I had no recourse outside of "Well, we can give you a small credit towards a new bar since we don't make that size anymore"......followed by "Out of business".

I did buy my truklites through River City Offroad and Marcus was on top of it. No issues thus far.

UKCRD

You raise some interesting points there. For me, living in the UK, and for anyone else outside of the US, the US customer service becomes somewhat irrelevant as returning stuff to the US and continually paying customs and shipping charges etc.., having a customer service number that works well as long as you call just after you've gone to bed, rather null and voids that "advantage".

On eBay there are several volume sellers, some based in the far east and a few EU based, who will drop ship you said lights for $150 but do provide a "reasonable" return or exchange service. It may not be as good or convenient as a UK based company might provide but a set of original JW Speaker lights here in the UK or EU would set you back $1k+, meaning I can purchase 7 pairs of unbranded lights for the price of one pair of branded with UK customer service. If that was ever to pay off I'd need to require that customer service 50 times a year at least and if that was the case I wouldn't be interested in the product in the first place.. As such, for me, if the unbranded are equal to the branded in terms of function and quality then I'd be mentally remiss to purchase the branded ones.

Over the years, I've chosen to support the US companies because we in the UK have a unique relationship with America and the UK does not have a large enough Jeep market to encourage UK companies to produce or import parts and accessories for Jeeps. There are a few small companies that do but their prices are ludicrous so many of us just direct import ourselves. As an example, the KC distributor here in the UK asks £600 plus shipping for a set of 4" LZRs. At today's exchange rate that's $800. Direct from KC they're $325..

For US buyers, I get the customer service argument and I would always encourage buying from US manufacturers. Buying re-branded Chinese goods at 5-7 times the direct retail cost (and keep in mind that those companies who re-brand buy in bulk and don't pay anywhere near what we would for a single order so their mark up maybe as high as 10x) well, not so much..

UKCRD

Now this is where I'm wary and slightly concerned. I've read this before. I'll be interested to see exactly how these lights cut off and if the light is focused or shotgun.

It would be interesting to hear from members who have the unbranded lights and hear how they've gotten on with them. Certainly, if they are the same sans a known brand label then their function should also be identical.

mr72

You are exactly right. If they're "copies" then they should be functionally identical. There's nothing about quality of manufacture or quality control that changes these things, they are design.

But you have to separate the "cheap identical copy of Trucklites" from the "cheap LED 'bulb' in the stock reflector". Or etc. etc. With projectors and HID there is a huge difference in how the projector is made, so there may potentially be a lot of variability.

The other thing is to separate just how much of this is operator error. Maybe it's installed wrong, maybe they are aimed wrong. So it could be not the product's fault.

The big thing is a lot of folks perceive it as bad simply because they equate China to junk and this dramatically colors their judgment. You hear this all the time in comments like "cheap materials" where truly they are identical but maybe they find casting marks on the Chinese one or they just simply think nothing should ever be made of "plastic" etc. or they presume that something won't be durable because it "feels cheap" blah blah. There's an old axiom in mechanical engineering: if it looks strong enough, it's overbuilt.

Anyway, I'll bail out of this now. I think you're on the right track. Maybe you should begin to import them and rebrand yourself Maybe I should move to UK and start a business. I already speak English and I can even drive on the left quite successfully

shabbernigdo

The chinese knock offs are not normally produced in the same factory that produces the origonal version. While one of the larger name brands might be produced in china they are normally subject to strict QC guidelines and such but the ones produced in other factories who copy the origonal design are not subject to the same standards and normally have cheaper / weaker componets and omit some parts / steps in order to cut costs. While they may look similar the quality is much less. Just look at the RR hood hinge for the JK as an example. The RR ones are made in china but are pretty good quality / fit / finish while there are dozens of clones made in other factories that are complete garbage.