WARN ZEON vs VR EVO: What an IP68 Rating Does and Does Not Tell You

Two winches sit on a shelf. Both spec sheets say IP68. A reasonable person concludes they are equally protected from water.

The ingress-protection code does not support that conclusion, and the clearest demonstration comes from a single manufacturer’s own documents disagreeing with each other.

Scope: what this page covers, and what it does not

This page is about what an IP rating on a winch specifies and what it leaves to the manufacturer, using WARN’s published materials as the worked example because WARN documents its lines in unusual detail. It is not a recommendation between models, and it is not a test result. This site does not submerge winches.

Product lines change. The comparison wording quoted below for “ZEON” and “VR” describes WARN’s earlier lineup; WARN has since stated that the ZEON XD replaces the standard ZEON lineup while supplies last, and the VR EVO succeeded the VR. Both eras are quoted here and labelled, because the older wording is where the sealing-scope distinction is stated most plainly.

What IP68 actually specifies

The second digit of an IP code describes protection against water. The value 8 means the equipment is suitable for continuous immersion in water under conditions which the manufacturer shall specify.

That last clause is the whole story. The depth and the duration are not in the standard; the maker chooses them and is required only to exceed the next grade down.

So IPX7 is a comparable number and IP68 is a comparable claim. Two products can both be honestly labelled IP68 after very different tests, and a spec sheet that prints the code without the conditions has told you the manufacturer ran an immersion test, not how deep or how long.

The second thing the code omits: what was sealed

Depth is only half of it. The rating does not say which parts of the product it covers.

WARN’s own comparison of its earlier VR and ZEON lines states this directly. Of the ZEON: “Entire winch unit is rated IP68 waterproof, for submersible operation.” Of the VR of that generation: “Winch is dust tight, weather-resistant, with IP68 waterproof electrical contactor.”

Read those side by side. One sentence applies the rating to the whole unit. The other applies it to a component, the electrical contactor, and describes the winch itself as weather-resistant. Both mention IP68. A buyer scanning for the code finds it in both places.

WARN characterises the difference in benefit terms as “Fewer points of water/debris entry, superior sealing, and total protection from the elements.”

Where WARN’s current documents disagree

For the current lineup the picture is less settled, and this is the finding worth the page.

These cannot both be describing the same product state. One says the VR EVO does not carry IP69K; the other assigns it IP69K in the same words used for the model it is supposedly distinguished from.

This page does not adjudicate that, though the dating is worth stating precisely rather than waving at. The blog post carries a visible publication date of June 6, 2024. The dealer literature PDF carries no date, revision marker or copyright year anywhere in it. So one document can be placed in time and the other cannot, which is not enough to establish which supersedes the other: an undated sheet may be newer, older, or still in circulation unchanged. What can be said is that a buyer who reads one WARN source and a buyer who reads another will come away with different beliefs about the same winch, and neither will have misread anything.

A government filing against the “including remote” wording

The literature PDF’s phrase “entire unit, including remote” is worth holding against a separate, independently verifiable document.

NHTSA safety recall 23V-536, filed in September 2023, covers WARN VR EVO wireless remote controls. The filing states that water exposure to the remote control can cause corrosion on the circuit board, that this “may cause the winch to operate when not intended or turn off when the switch button is released,” and that “there is a safety risk of personal injury if the winch operates unexpectedly.” The remedy disables the wireless battery pack, and WARN replaces the unit with a corded-only remote where corrosion is found.

Be precise about scope, because it matters in three directions at once. The recall concerns the handheld remote, not the winch drum or motor housing. It was filed by Rosenbauer America, a fire-apparatus builder, rather than by WARN, and it covers 13 units across a set of Rosenbauer fire-truck models that shipped with a factory-installed VR EVO winch. It is therefore not a broad consumer recall of retail winches, and nobody should read it as one. And a recall is a documented failure population rather than a statement about a rating’s validity. But it is a real, filed, government record of water reaching electronics in a product family whose own dealer literature described the rating as covering the entire unit including the remote.

IP69K is not a bigger IP68

One more thing the codes hide. IP69K is routinely printed beside IP68 as though it were the next rung of the same ladder. It is not from the same standard.

IP69K originated in the German standard DIN 40050-9 and was subsequently folded into ISO 20653, the road-vehicle ingress standard, rather than into IEC 60529 where IP68 sits. It tests resistance to close-range, high-pressure, high-temperature water jets applied from multiple angles.

That is a washdown test, not a deeper-immersion test. A winch carrying both is telling you it survived being submerged under the maker’s chosen conditions and being blasted at close range. Neither implies the other, which is why products carry both codes rather than the higher one alone.

Who publishes the number

If the depth and duration are what make an IP68 comparable, the useful question is who states them.

Smittybilt does, on its own site: its XRC winches are described as “rated at IP67 meaning (‘Dust tight’ and ‘Waterproof to 3 feet for 30 minutes’)”, and of the X20 line, “The IP68 rating allows for permanent submersion up to 13 feet.”

That is more information than most competitors publish, and it still needs a caveat: “permanent submersion” is marketing phrasing rather than a test condition, since the code contemplates a specified duration rather than an indefinite one. A depth with no time is half a specification.

Among the materials reviewed for this page, WARN’s give the code and qualitative language rather than a depth-and-time pair. That is not a criticism unique to WARN; it appears to be the industry norm.

What this page could not establish

Several things, and they bound what you should take from it.

Which WARN document is current on the VR EVO and IP69K could not be resolved. The blog post is dated June 6, 2024; the dealer literature PDF carries no date or revision marker at all, so there is nothing to sequence it against.

Model-by-model confirmation on warn.com was incomplete. Repeated automated requests to individual WARN product pages were rate-limited, so per-model detail for some SKUs rests on retailer listings mirroring WARN’s copy rather than on WARN’s own page for each one. No contradiction surfaced within either line, but the check was not exhaustive.

Depth and duration figures for Superwinch and Milemarker could not be confirmed from their own materials. Absence of a published figure is reported here as absence, not as a claim that none exists.

Finally, the phrasing that sent us looking — that one WARN line may be operated while submerged and another should not — was not found in WARN’s own materials in those words. It appears to originate with a third-party retailer blog. What WARN does publish is the sealing-scope distinction quoted above, which is a narrower and better-evidenced claim, and it is the one this page makes.

How we sourced this

RiggingOps does not test gear. Every quotation from WARN, Smittybilt and NHTSA is taken from that party’s own page, literature or filing, and each is linked in the sources with what it is being cited for.

Two things here are cited by designation rather than by link, deliberately. ISO 20653 and DIN 40050-9, the standards behind IP69K, are paywalled and their publisher pages blocked automated access while this page was written; they are named by designation so the citation survives a dead or blocked URL. The WARN operator manual quoted in the questions below is a generic, line-agnostic document numbered 98972A0 carrying a 2017 copyright, and the copy read for this page was hosted by a retailer rather than fetched from WARN, so it is described rather than linked and its age is stated.

Where two documents from the same manufacturer conflict, this page shows both rather than choosing, because choosing would mean asserting a fact neither source establishes. Where a figure exists only as marketing language, it is quoted and labelled as such. Where a check was blocked or incomplete, it is named above rather than smoothed over.

If you need a definitive answer on a specific model’s sealing, ask the manufacturer and get it in writing. A code on a spec sheet is a starting point for that question, not an answer to it.

Related reading

For the same problem in a different rating system, where a published number turns out to depend on which chapter of a standard applies, see which ASME standard covers a recovery hook and WLL vs MBS. For the line on the drum rather than the housing around it, see synthetic winch rope vs steel cable. For sizing rather than sealing, see what size winch do I need.

This page is part of the broader recovery gear ratings pillar.