Here are the best cars with lightbars

Here’s a fact for you: no car is faster than its headlights. The science is simple. It doesn’t matter how fast your car is, if you’ve got a pair of tealights guiding you, you’re not going to be travelling very quickly as you can’t see where you’re going. Unless you’re especially brave/stupid or have some military spec-night vision goggles in your glovebox, that is. If you do have the latter, you may want to delete your internet history. When the sun goes to bed and day turns to night, there is a way to brighten up the world: lightbars.

We love a good lightbar here at Top Gear. So we were delighted to see that Lamborghini has peppered its potty new off-road Huracán 'Sterrato' with a big lightbar and two LED spots. Excuse us while we doff our caps.

The Sterrato is what happens when you want to ramp up the madness of the Huracán. It’s an off-road supercar with the well-known sonorous 5.2-litre, naturally aspirated V10, jacked up suspension, protective bodywork and lightbars. Given it’s got 630bhp, you can probably go chuffing quickly in the dark in this thing because of said lightbars. 

But this excellent addition to Lambo's lineup has got us up for an adventure. And reminded us of some other spectacular cars that wear LED tiaras to light up the night. So click on and tell us your favourite below.

This is a Rezvani Tank, something described by its maker as a ‘tactical urban vehicle’ and an antidote to the increasingly samey SUV segment. Its designer aimed to make a modern-day successor to the Hummer, and for sheer in-your-face impact, he’s doubtless achieved it.

The Tank comes in three flavours, starting at $165,000 (about £125,000). That buys you a standard version with a 285bhp 3.6-litre V6 driving all four wheels. Spend another $100,000 or so and you can upgrade to either the Tank X – which uses the 707bhp 6.2-litre V8 from a Dodge Hellcat – or the Tank Military Edition.

That has a milder, 500bhp V8 but a wealth of bulletproof and bombproof tech – as well as an outlandishly silly smokescreen function – to protect you from the apocalypse and a retina-searing lightbar. Which, as we found out, was perfect while hunting for aliens. You can read about that here.

McLaren doesn't just build cars. It’s also an entertainment company. Think of them like four-wheeled party planners. See, if you’re rich enough, buying one of its supercars doesn’t just mean you can flop out a McLaren key fob at the pub, it also means you’re eligible to participate in one of Woking's curated automotive experiences. This can take the form of a track day at Spa, a proper GT3 race, or if you like the cold, its Arctic Experience in freezing Finland. Each winter, a bunch of 570S' wear a tow rope thong (to tug you out when you inevitably dive bumper-first into a snowbank), spiked tyres and lightbars to hit the ice and skid around a frozen lake. Don’t you think a lightbar should be a stock option on all 570s? We do.

This is not just a yellow Ford F-150 with a lightbar. First, it has been upgraded by Ford itself to create the Raptor, adding a considerably wider track than standard (now 6ft 1in between the wheels at either end), Baja-spec Fox Racing long-travel suspension and a couple of upgrades to the 6.2-litre V8 to produce 411bhp. It’s one of the most sought-after trucks in the US, a potent combination of power, presence, utility and the ability to lollop across a desert at 90mph without prolapsing a transmission.

But this Raptor is even more special. It’s old Top Gear alumni fettled by Hennessey Performance from Texas, sporting a nice Whipple supercharger, extra-large fuel injectors and a smidgen of extra intercooling. What you get, therefore, is a Raptor with no less than 623bhp and 627lb ft. And it’s called the VelociRaptor. Which immediately gives it the kind of macho cachet only usually achieved by a long career as a hirsute backwoods lumberjack. It’s also got a brilliant lightbar. But it’s also completely self-aware and happy to be a caricature. Which makes it utterly brilliant.

The Nomad takes the lessons learned from the Atom and heads in an entirely different direction. A more off-roady direction. One where a spirit of adventure (and a set of roof-mounted spotlights) is necessary. So one day we had the idea of driving the Ariel Nomad to the top of a mountain. An adventure not only for the Nomad, but also one that would test the mettle of the Land Rover Discovery, which we’d get to tow it there and act as support car/survival cell. The mountain of choice was Mont Ventoux. In the perilous conditions, we figured a lightbar was a must. On reflection, a mountain bike wasn’t but we took it along anyway. And a flag, just in case we conquered the mountain. You can see if we did here.

It’s hard to put your finger on why the Mercedes G-Class (or G-Wagen, if like us, you’re still stuck in Benzo’s late-Nineties nomenclature) has such a strong magnetic attraction to a wide-reaching demographic of people.

The archaic box on wheels is loved equally by kids, oligarchs, sheikhs, rappers, farmers… hell, even the Kardashians. Oh, and us car enthusiasts who find utilitarian charm and classless park-anywhere-ability as virtuous enough reason to file it under the ‘good car’ banner. Plus, you can bolt lots of things to it. Yes, there’s potential for a V12, posh leather and a banging stereo. But if you want to get a bit more ‘Humanitarian Aid Worker’ than ‘Harrods’ you can also bolt a winch on the front. Great if you need to winch yourself back up onto a byway if you fall off it… or do some unexpected clothes drying. Then there’s potential for a giant lightbar. Great for seeing where you’re going… or if you need to light an entire football pitch.

A Mitsubishi L200 does not come with a lightbar as standard. Let alone enough lightbars bright enough to illuminate the Singapore GP. But it also does not come with an old plane wing full of drones. This is what happens when you look into a Top Gear journalist’s brain. Specifically, the brain of Tom Ford.

“We decided to build an adventure truck from the solid and utilitarian base of a Mitsubishi L200. What came out the other side, thanks to a team of very clever, creative and obligingly co-operative people, I christened Project Swarm. A kind of European take on a pre-runner desert racer, but which also carried a survival-style moped, and had an aeroplane wing mounted on the back as a hangar for drones. It also got a PPC external roll-cage, 35in tyres and Speedline wheels, military-spec SuperPro suspension, rear-mounted spares, Dakar-style Cobra seats, an on-board compressor, a winch, a wide-arch treatment and enough Lazerlamps LED lighting to temporarily blind West Africa.”

Read about what happened when we took it to Namibia here.

Cheaper and easier to run than a full-on armoured vehicle. Perfect for the school-run and equipped with a lightbar. And gun. Ladies and gents, say hello to the Yago. Built by composite and armour specialists Plasan (the people that made the carbon bits for the Viper ACR, Corvette C7 Stingray and Ford GT500KR), this ‘ultralight tactical armoured vehicle’ Yagu is based on an Arctic Cat Wildcat 4 1000, so it’s not very big. It’s got a 95bhp 1.0-litre V-twin and an auto ‘box with selectable two or four-wheel drive, as well as an electric front diff lock and decent ground clearance and axle travel, so it can clamber about with impunity.

We’re all fans of slightly jacked-up big estates. But when we had to take the Mercedes-Benz E-Class All-Terrain to a bear infested Estonian forest, we thought we’d go full-on belts and braces. Now, a standard All-Terrain comes with lights, but not enough lights. So we decided to pay slight homage to the Red Sow race car by fitting four 180mm PIAA LED race spots (£282 a pair, in case you were wondering) on the rack in the same pattern as the bumper-mounted versions on that car. They would illuminate most of the forest. The worklights mounted around the car covered the last 20 per cent. 

To see how we got in with the bears, click here.