How Long Do Bike Rack Lights Last?

John Shinstock

2 days ago

3 min read

Someone asked me last week: how long do bike rack lights last? I didn't have a tidy answer. Not because the answer is bad — because a number of years isn't something I can hand you and have it mean anything.

What I can do is open the box and walk you through it. Every material, every rating, and where each number comes from.

Then you can judge it yourself.

The brackets

A rack light lives on the back of a vehicle. It gets rain, road spray, grit, and in most of the country, salt. The bracket is the part that has to hold all of that together.

We use two metals, because the two jobs are different.

Steel, 1/8" thick — the rack mount — the piece that clamps onto your rack. Steel, because that joint takes the load and the vibration.
Aluminum, 1/8" thick — the light bracket — this one carries the light. Aluminum keeps weight off the back of the rack without giving up durability.
Stainless steel — every bolt, nut and washer — hardware is the first thing to rust on a vehicle. So all of ours is stainless steel.

An eighth of an inch is thicker than it sounds. Hold a stack of two pennies. That's the metal.

Both brackets get a textured semi-gloss powder coat — Cardinal C241-BK01 or equivalent, an exterior-grade finish. Powder coat bonds to the metal instead of sitting on top of it like paint, and the texture hides the scuffs a rack picks up from bike pedals and gear bags.

Waterproof, with actual numbers

“Waterproof” on a product page doesn't tell you anything. An IP rating does, and it's two digits with specific meanings.

IP65 — dust-tight, and rated for water jets from any direction. Highway spray, a pressure washer at the car wash, a week of rain.
IP67 — dust-tight, and rated for temporary submersion. A flooded parking lot, a boat ramp, a creek crossing on a forest road.

Kody bike rack light with lights illuminated on a Yakima OnRamp bike rack.

Our single 16" light and our license plate light are IP67 rated. The other light bars are IP65. Every housing is sealed, with a polycarbonate lens and a polycarbonate body — the same material used for safety glasses and headlight lenses.

I'd rather give you the number than the adjective. If a light doesn't publish one, that tells you something too.

Cold, and the salt that comes with it

Our sequential light is rated to operate from −30°C to +50°C. In plain numbers, that's −22°F to 122°F.

That range matters more than it looks. A light that's fine in October can go dim or flicker on a January morning in Colorado, and LEDs that aren't rated for cold are exactly where that shows up. Salt-treated roads finish the job on anything with exposed steel hardware.

That's the reason for the stainless steel hardware and the sealed housings. Not because it sounds good on a page — because winter is the test.

Road legal, every light

Every light we sell is DOT FMVSS-108 compliant. That's the federal standard for vehicle lighting — the same standard the lights your rack is covering had to meet.

I went through every supplier data sheet in our catalog this month to confirm each product page matched the sheet. Where a page over-claimed, I changed the page, not the sheet. That's a boring afternoon and it's the reason I'll put these numbers in writing.

Where they're built

Kody lights are designed and assembled in Davis, California. We're a family business — the people who put your kit together are the same people who answer the phone when you call.

That's also why every kit gets tested before it goes in the box. Not a sample from the batch. Yours. A light that fails on day one costs us a customer, and we don't have customers to spare.

So how long do bike rack lights last?

I'm still not going to invent a number of years. What I'll tell you is where the money went.

Thicker metal than the job strictly needs. Stainless steel hardware instead of plated. Sealed housings with published IP ratings instead of the word “waterproof.” An exterior powder coat instead of paint. Every one of those is a place where we could have saved a few dollars a unit and nobody would have noticed for two or three years.

We went the other way, and then we published the numbers so you can hold us to them.

If you're weighing us against something cheaper, the five questions worth asking are in this post — fitment, road rating, reverse, sealing and size.