Due to the features of energy conservation, long lifetime, durability and high response speed etc., the LED sources have played a more and more important role in daily life in recent years, including the automotive lighting.To guarantee an optimized lighting distribution for safe driving, the LED automotive luminaires, especially the headlight, require precise optical design.In current applications, the luminous distribution data are acquired by goniophotometers in the so-called far-filed condition, which is accurate in characterizing and certificating the luminaires.But the majority of optical components are located in the near filed.Far-field data are difficult to assist the second optical design, while the near-filed technique can.The technique firstly build a ray mode through the light tracing.The model could be directly employed in commercial softwares, eg: TracePro, Zemax, etc., and the lighting distribution can be extrapolated at any distance.The paper provides a comprehensive illustration of near-field measurement from methodology to utilization.The obtained results of the LED headlight by the near-filed goniophotometer show high resemblance compared to that by far-field goniophotometer.The efficacy in space and cost brought by near-field measurement also helps to improve the design speed and quality, and thus near-field goniophotometer becomes a desirable tool in the research work of LED luminaires.