As a child of the 1980s who came of age in the early ’90s, pop-up headlights are, in my mind, the peak of automotive cool. All the raddest, most interesting cars of my childhood — Lamborghinis, Starions, Trans-Ams, Fieros — had pop-ups. Heck, even mom cars like Honda Accords had ’em. I once even had the pleasure of owning a car with flip-up headlights, my 1990 Dodge Daytona. Unfortunately, you just don’t see pop-up headlights anymore, which is a real bummer.
Why, though? Why don’t cars have flip-up headlights anymore? Is it forgotten knowledge? Nah. Is it a conspiracy? Nah. Is it because carmakers don’t know how to make cool cars anymore? Okay, well, that last one is mostly true, but it’s not why we don’t have flip-up headlights anymore. Not really, anyway. No, unfortunately, a combination of tightening pedestrian crash regulations, advancements in headlight technology, and the introduction of the Ford Taurus is what killed the best automotive feature since the electric starter.
So, let’s talk about why cars don’t have flip-up headlights anymore, and why that’s proof that we live in the bad timeline. First, though, a little history.
The birth of cool
According to our friends over in Ann Arbor, the first car to offer pop-up headlights was the devastatingly beautiful 1936 Cord 810. In the Cord’s case, the headlights were hidden so as to not break up the front fender lines with the big, goofy, bug-eyed headlights used at the time. Pop-up headlights were used on and off over the next few decades by a variety of carmakers, but they were rare. It wasn’t until the ’60s and ’70s when car designers started hiding dorky looking and federally mandated sealed beam headlights behind various covers and grilles, and hidden headlights really took off, especially pop-up ones. They were almost de rigeur in the early ’80s, especially if you wanted to sell a cool, futuristic, wedge-shaped car like the aforementioned Starion.
Unfortunately for the pop-up headlight, and the general coolness of the world at large, pop-up headlights were on borrowed time by the mid-80s. They’d always been finicky, touchy things, and the complex mechanisms that operated them — electric motors, vacuum pumps, tiny little levers and hinges, etc. — were prone to failure. Cars with busted pop-ups were often left with a winky face, one headlight up and one down, or had their pop-ups permanently fixed in the open position. Some, like the headlights on my ’90 Daytona (which were broken), could be manually opened and closed with dials just inside the hood, but that was a huge pain.
Drivers put up with it, though, ’cause sometimes you gotta suffer to look cool. Then, in 1984, a little old automaker from Dearborn, Michigan, called the Ford Motor Company started events in motion that would directly lead to the death of the pop-up headlight.
Totally bogus, dude
See, Ford had been lobbying the feds all throughout the development of the Taurus to get headlight regulations relaxed, because the company just couldn’t make their new wündercar with regular old sealed beam headlights. No, they needed these new, flush, composite lights that the boys over at the lab had come up with. Eventually the feds relented, loosened restrictions on what headlights could look like and how they could be made, and the rest is history.
To be fair to the Taurus here, the demise of pop-up headlights wasn’t totally its fault. Pop-ups remained relatively popular into the ’90s, but their star was on the wane for sure. By the late ’90s pop-ups were pretty much only for sports cars and exotics like the Cizeta Moroder V16T. Then, in 1998, an EU mandate regarding pedestrian safety regulations essentially killed pop-ups in Europe. Over here in The Colonies, pop-ups soldiered bravely on, but by the early aughts only two cars had them anymore: the C5 Chevy Corvette and the Lotus Esprit V8. Those were the last cars to be equipped with pop-up headlights in the U.S., and by the middle of the decade they were all but gone, replaced by squinty, weird-shaped composite lights, gaudy angel eyes, and annoying HIDs.
So, there you have it. The death of pop-up headlights was caused by a number of factors, but it all boils down to, essentially, improved pedestrian safety and changing tastes. Cars may be safer nowadays, but they’re a lot less cool and we’re poorer for it.
