10 Sports Cars That Borrowed Headlights and Taillights From Other Cars

We’ll begin with a well-known case. When Lamborghini facelifted the Diablo before the final few years of its life, it ditched the original design’s pop-up headlights. That was, objectively, a mistake. However, the choice to replace them with fixed lamps out of a Z32-generation Nissan 300ZX kind of worked with the car’s shape, and arguably modernized the face — which at this point was getting pretty stale after a decade in the spotlight. Less surprising: These headlights were also used for the Nissan R390 GT1 race car and homologation road car that you saw at the top of this post.

I’ll give Lister some credit for reusing Audi parts on its short-lived Storm grand tourer, because at least the British company took the liberty of messing with their placement just a bit to distinguish them from their treatment on the original car. The body-color gap between the two halves of the Audi 80's taillight helped account for the Storm’s wide haunches.

The Morgan Aero 8 not only reused Volkswagen New Beetle headlights, but flipped and reversed ’em for maximum weirdness. Later iterations of the British coupe would replace them with Mini units, while the Morgan AeroMax plucked the banana-shaped pods from the rear end of Lancia’s Thesis sedan, of all things.

Excuse the oblique angle and hot beach couple in the background and focus on the lighting here, please. The X180 redesign of the Lotus Esprit carried units from the iconic AE86 Toyota Corolla Levin. Of course, the original Esprit had taillights from a Rover SD1, so this sort of thing was very much a Lotus practice. Besides, lights were nothing; next time, the sports-car maker would pilfer one of Toyota’s engines.

Are you noticing a theme between British performance car manufacturers and purveyors of decidedly more ordinary vehicles? It’s fair to assume that many parts of Noble’s vehicles are borrowed from other cars, though perhaps no act of parts bin theft was more egregious, nor more out of place, than when Noble stuck fourth-gen Sonata taillights on the back of its M400 track-day superstar. (An earlier iteration of the car featured a pair from the Mondeo.) Rob Emslie actually acknowledged this similarity before on this very site — 12 years ago — but it never gets any less amusing.

What’s interesting about TVR’s repurposing of econobox taillights on the Cerbera is that it while those are very clearly Mk. 3 Fiesta units, the aperture around them is bespoke, which is a clever bit of subterfuge that works better in practice than you’d think. Nice one, TVR.

The second-generation Mazda MX-6, built between 1991 and 1997, found its way onto the world’s greatest stage of endurance racing via the Panoz Esperante GTR-1's taillights. Nobody ever talks about it anymore, but the MX-6 was actually a pretty spiffy looking little coupe. The GTR-1, on the other hand, looked like alien snot — especially in metallic green.

The MG XPower SV is many things: a De Tomaso, a Qvale and even a Mustang. The lighting, however, is all Fiat. The headlights were pulled off the second-gen Punto, and the four round rear lamps came from the ever-divisive Coupé.

The Cizeta-Moroder V16T not only doubled up on pop-up headlights; it also borrowed taillights from the Alpine GTA and A610. This is in fairness the fourth most interesting about the V16T — a car with a past so dramatic and mired in litigation, I get secondhand anxiety just reading about it.

So this isn’t the finest picture, but it turns out it’s very, very hard to find official images of the Invicta S1 — the short-lived, limited-production British (you guessed it) sports car powered by Ford’s five-liter V8. If you look past the difference in reflector color on this example, you’ll find that Invicta swiped some B5.5 Passat taillights and then turned them on their sides to complete the S1's rear end.

Cars sharing lights may not be a rare or novel phenomenon, but it is nonetheless interesting to observe when it happens — especially when the source car is so vastly unlike the recipient. Let us know which of these cases intrigues you the most, and feel free to turn us and your fellow readers on to examples we didn’t mention in the comments below.

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