5 Cars That Chart the Progress of Pop-up Lights

This story first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.

It has been 20 years since the last cars with the distinctive peekaboo lighting solution went out of production. Yet for enthusiasts who came of age in the Reagan era (or who wish they did), they remain one of the clearest markers of a cool car. Their history, in some respects, tracks the evolution of the automobile itself. Join us for a brief tour of the rise and fall of pop-up headlights.

The Pioneer: 1936 Cord 810

Car design in the 1930s was all about streamlining. Industrial designers pared down the ornamental aspects of art deco but kept its smooth, sleek shapes. Protruding headlamps literally stand in the way of that aesthetic, so many designers began fairing them into the fenders. The logical next step was to hide the lights entirely. Auburn stylist Gordon Buehrig was the first to do so on a production vehicle by adding Stinson retractable airplane landing lights to the 1936 Cord. 

If you should pass a Cord on the road, don’t expect its driver to offer you a “pop-up salute” (quickly raising and lowering the headlights)—the Cord’s must be cranked up and down by hand.

The Nose-Job: 1970 Plymouth Superbird

By the 1960s and early ’70s, hidden headlamps had become a fashionable aesthetic across a range of models, but a few sports cars, including the Stingray Corvette and Ferrari GTB/4 Daytona, specifically exploited pop-ups for aerodynamic advantage. Yet no one took it as far as Mopar. Dodge was first, affixing a big schnoz on its Charger so that it could dominate NASCAR in 1969. Sister brand Plymouth did the same the following season, placing a nose cone on its Road Runner.

Because Dodge and Plymouth had to sell limited numbers of street versions in order to race on Sunday, they integrated retractable headlights into the fascia of the road cars.

As far as nose jobs go, these have to be among the more expensive: Due to their racing pedigree and rarity, a Charger Daytona or Road Runner Superbird with a numbers-matching Hemi can be worth hundreds of thousands more than a wingless Charger or Road Runner.

Muscle Metamorphosis: 1982 Pontiac Trans Am

Amid unpredictable gas prices and tightening fuel-economy regulations in the 1980s, automakers were scrambling for every efficiency improvement, including through aerodynamics. The sealed-beam headlamps mandated by the federal government created a lot of drag, so many automakers opted to tuck them away.

Of course, pop-ups also fit the zeitgeist—at the dawn of the computer era, everyone wanted to look futuristic. For cars, that meant a sleek wedge shape, with no headlights to be seen.

More cars with pop-ups were produced in the 1980s than in any other decade. Everything from Alpines to Accords had ’em, but our favorite remains the third-gen Trans Am. Perhaps nothing captures the difference between the ’70s and the ’80s better than the transition from the rough-and-tumble Burt Reynolds’ Bandit to David Hasselhoff’s sleek, computerized KITT.

Peak Pop-Up: 1991 Cizeta Moroder V16T

No one does excess quite like the Italians. The Cizeta boasts 16 cylinders and four retractable headlights. It was built by ex-Lamborghini engineers and penned by the man behind the Countach. Improbably, the supercar funded by a pioneering disco producer and launched during a recession was not a success.

The Holdout: 2004 Chevrolet Corvette

In 1984, the federal government—with heavy lobbying from Ford as it prepared the aerodynamically advanced Taurus—loosened its regulations concerning headlight standardization. By the early 1990s, automakers were getting the hang of making flush-mount composite headlights, and the expensive and failure-prone pop-up mechanisms began to seem like a bad idea.

By the time the fifth-generation Corvette debuted in 1997, sports car rivals like the Toyota Supra and Mitsubishi 3000 GT had already ditched their hidden lamps for projector beams, and the Acura NSX was soon to follow. When the C5 Corvette went out of production in 2004, the pop-up party was over. We likely won’t see them again, thanks largely to safety regulations. Modern pedestrian protection requirements don’t explicitly forbid pop-ups, but the sharp edges inherent to a protruding light are difficult (read: expensive) to engineer around.