The Face You Remember
Headlights play a huge role in how a car looks. They're often the first thing you notice about the front end, and their shape can make a car instantly recognizable. Some designs have remained popular for decades, while others looked awkward from the moment they appeared. Even a well-engineered car can struggle to win people over if buyers can't get past its appearance. Here are 10 headlight designs that helped make their cars iconic, and 10 that spoiled an otherwise decent-looking vehicle.
1. Porsche 911
Porsche carried the round, upright lamps over from the 356 and kept them for decades with only minor changes. Two circles sitting high over the front wheels do most of the work of making the car recognizable from across a parking lot. Porsche eventually found out what happens when you abandon them, and that one shows up further down.
2. Citroën DS
The 1967 facelift gave the DS four lamps behind a single pane of glass, with the inner pair swiveling as you turned the wheel. Nobody else was doing that on a road car. American regulations wouldn't permit it, so cars sold in the States got fixed units and a duller face.
3. Jaguar E-Type
Covering the lamps with glass let the fender line run unbroken from the nose to the windshield. The early cars look lower and longer than they measure, and much of that comes from the front. The covers didn't survive contact with US lighting rules.
4. Lamborghini Miura
Chrome slats surrounded each headlight, giving them the appearance of eyelashes. They were purely decorative, a rare flourish on a car otherwise focused on performance. Later versions dropped them for a cleaner look, but the front end lost much of the personality that made the original so memorable.
5. Mazda MX-5
Flip the lamps up on an early MX-5 and the car changes expression completely. Pop-ups were already going out of fashion by 1989, and Mazda fitted them anyway because the hood line needed to stay low. Pedestrian safety rules finished them off a decade later.
6. Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray
Chevrolet hid the lamps for 1963, tucking them into panels that rotated out of the bodywork. With the panels shut, the front reads as one continuous curve with nothing interrupting it. The mechanism gave owners trouble and they seem to have forgiven it.
7. Volkswagen Beetle
Two round headlights sit high on the fenders, spaced far enough apart to give the car its familiar face. The arrangement wasn't necessarily meant to resemble a friendly expression, but that's how generations of drivers came to see it. It's also one of the easiest cars to recognize in a cartoon, even with just a few simple lines.
8. Datsun 240Z
Datsun set the lamps deep into scooped housings rather than covering them with glass. The effect comes close to the E-Type's for a fraction of what Jaguar was charging, and that comparison followed the car around. The scoops also kept the lamps legal in America.
9. BMW 5 Series
BMW's E39 facelift added illuminated rings around each lamp and owners started calling them angel eyes. At night the rings identify the car before you can make out anything else about it. Plenty of manufacturers borrowed the idea, and the aftermarket borrowed it badly.
10. Audi R8
Audi offered full LED headlights on the R8 before almost anyone else, and the daytime strip under each unit became its signature. Within a few years almost every manufacturer wanted a lighting signature of its own. Whether that has been good for car design is still argued about.
Now, here's 10 headlights that spoiled the front end.
1. Porsche 996
For the 996, Porsche swapped the round lamps for teardrop units that swept back into the fender and shared parts with the cheaper Boxster. Owners named them fried eggs almost immediately. The 997 brought back something closer to a circle, and 996 values spent years depressed with the headlights getting much of the blame.
2. Subaru Impreza
Subaru traded the Impreza's rectangular lamps for large round ones in 2001, and the reaction was bad enough that the front got redrawn after two model years. Enthusiasts called it the bugeye and didn't mean it kindly. Its replacement got nicknamed the blobeye, so the situation improved only in a technical sense.
3. Fiat Multipla
Fiat put a second pair of lamps at the base of the Multipla's windshield, above the main units down in the bumper. There was some logic to it, given how tall and wide the body was. The car then topped ugliest-vehicle polls for years and got facelifted into something ordinary.
4. Pontiac Aztek
The Aztek divided its lighting into a thin upper pair and a second set further down, with grille wedged in between. None of it lines up with anything else happening on the body. The vehicle underneath was competent and it made little difference to anyone.
5. Ford Scorpio
The 1994 Scorpio arrived with enormous rounded lamps that bulged out past the grille and left the car looking permanently startled. British magazines were merciless. Ford had built a decent executive sedan and buyers wouldn't go near the front of it.
6. Jaguar E-Type Series 2
Exposed lamps were a US requirement, so Jaguar pulled the glass covers off and raised the units slightly. The change looks minor on paper and it costs the nose its unbroken line. Covered-headlight cars still trade well above the later ones.
7. Nissan Juke
Nissan put thin running lights where you expect the headlights and moved the actual lamps down into round housings. The decision was deliberate and it worked commercially, since the car sold for a decade. It also meant nobody could quite agree on where the Juke's eyes were.
8. Toyota Prius
On the fourth-generation Prius the lamps ran down into sharp points at the corners of the bumper, well below the hood line. Toyota reworked the front at the facelift and the later cars look calmer for it. Underneath, the car was better than it had ever been.
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) on Wikimedia
9. BMW 7 Series
Each headlight on the 2022 7 Series splits into a slim upper element and a separate cluster below it. BMW has spent several model cycles widening grilles and splitting lamps, and the reaction has been mixed at best. Buyers of the big SUVs got the same treatment.
10. Ford Taurus
Ford committed to ovals on the third-generation Taurus, and the lamps came out as soft rounded shapes echoing the grille and nearly everything else. Buyers who had made the Taurus the best-selling car in America went elsewhere. Ford squared the front off again a few years later.
