Personally I would look for the best halogens available for your factory housing and in the future if you choose to add a winch mount or bull bar then add some brilliant light force fog lamps or equivalent to brighten the night with some flair.
Morgan, There is no winch mount in the fugitive's future. The existing bull bars are more like a fragile nudge bar, with crappy mounting options and reduced approach angle. Worse, they use the front tow points for mounting. Not willing to lose those. Most were also designed for the 2000-2001 escape bumper cover and are a lousy fit on the 2005 regarding placement of license plate and bumper openings.
The front mounting locations for lighting are poor at best. It's all plastic up there. Big lights are right out. I found some custom mini cooper light mounts that I might be able to mount to the lower side of the metal bumper (hidden), placing the lights in the lower bumper cover opening. Need to do some measuring and do a mock-up to see what will fit.
My original plan was high performance halogens for hi/lo, but after reading too many bulb reviews, the typical lifespan is waaaay too short.
Traditional wisdom says LEDs don't play well in reflectors designed for halogen, but there are some nice LEDs on the market now that mimic the emitter location on a halogen.
Utube has some good LED tests showing/measuring the output/pattern of LED bulbs in reflector housings. What I have seen leads me to want to try some LED bulbs in the fog light location. Results will help to decide what to do with the hi/low lights.
I am kicking around the possibility of mounting a single row light bar on the front lower bar of my roof rack. I mounted the rack low, so there's not a lot of room between the roof and the rack for lighting.
