Thirty six years ago, in a small farming village in northern Israel just below the Nazareth mountains, a couple of former Israeli Special Forces service members decided to draw on their vast experience, knowledge, and shared passion for off-roading to launch what would become ASFIR 4×4. Nearly four decades later, the outfit is thriving, its production facility full of the latest, most advanced production technologies to help support a full range of off-roading essentials, including winch bumpers and winch mounts, off-road lighting solutions, side protection pieces, and ASFIR’s bread and butter, skid plates.

Yet even with cutting-edge production tech, a global presence, and distribution across multiple continents, the group is still remarkably well integrated, with research & development, production, service, and sales all based out of Israel. Apart from keeping each product’s overhead low, this means that from its initial inception, through R&D, production, and right up until the moment it reaches your door, it has benefitted from a group of people with a shared vision every step of the way.

The benefits of such an approach become obvious on first inspection of one of ASFIR’s skid plates. Offering quality and fitment that’s tough to match, these laser-cut panels are made from tough quarter-inch-thick aluminum using precisely sized patterns, so no cutting, drilling, or welding will ever be required. They’re stronger pound-for-pound than any equivalent steel skid plate, and aluminum carries the additional benefit of not being susceptible to rust – a quality whose significance is hard to overstate in an application where scrapes and scratches are an occupational hazard.

Of course, most important of all is the level of protection the skid plates provide, and here, too, ASFIR 4×4 is difficult to match. The company offers some of the most comprehensive underbody off-road protection packages on the market today, with wide-coverage protection for vital components like the gearbox, transfer case, differential, control arms, shocks – basically anything in a position to potentially be impacted off-road.

Installation is dead simple, too. If you have access to jack stands and a wrench, and a couple of hours to kill, you’re already halfway there. Every design is rigorously studied and validated to ensure that mounting holes line up perfectly with the OEM hardware locations, and ASFIR adheres strictly to ISO 9001:2015 – a stringent international standard that lays out requirements for a robust quality management system.

And while you might be pessimistic as to whether an Israeli company could possibly carry underbody protection – or any other off-road product, for that matter – for your very particular American/German/Japanese/French/Italian/whatever-corner-of-the-globe off-road vehicle, you might be surprised. Remember: ASFIR 4×4 is a global brand with a foothold on multiple continents. So your brand new 2021 Ford Bronco? Covered. Your neighbor’s Jeep Wrangler JL 4XE? That’s covered too. Your boss’s ex-wife’s stepson’s old Toyota Tacoma? ASFIR might just have something that will work.

These days, off-road enthusiasts have their pick of the litter when it comes to off-road-focused aftermarket accessories. The market has been absolutely flooded in recent years, both with “real deal” products and cheap knock-offs alike, to the extent that it can be hard to know where to turn or who to trust. There are few feelings worse than having a brand new underbody protection kit ship to your door, only to find once your truck is already up on stands that the mounting locations for the lower control arm protective plates aren’t quite right, and you have to drill fresh holes in your shiny new skid plates.

With ASFIR 4×4, that’s not something you need to worry about, so you can get back out on the trail quickly, knowing your off-road rig is protected from the ground up.