It’s always interesting to find that your obsessions had fellow obsessives long before you were born. That’s why I was so excited to see this old 1960 Popular Mechanics article about taillights, which is a deep dive into how taillights could be better, in an era when it seemed like the only goal was to see how much…
Hey pals! You know what we haven’t done in a while? Not that, I made some promises to people about that. I’m talking about having a good, honest, tricky-but-fair taillight identification quiz! This is how you spend a Sunday afternoon, people. Not glumly riding out the clock on the weekend, watching depressing Dr.Who…
There’s really no better place in the world to assess the visceral, gut-level impact of modern taillight design than right here, the foremost crucible of taillight reactions on the internet. With that in mind, I’d like to pose a question to you: how do you feel about the design and layout of the new Hyundai Kona’s…
I’m very fortunate in that our readers tend to be fantastic. They’re the sort of people that take note of what interests me as a writer, and then reach out to me with things they suspect I’d find interesting. As such, a number of readers have emailed me pictures of strange, secret taillights hidden in trunks, because…
I have a list, right here on my computer, of a bunch of interesting and important stories I need to be working on. And yet I know, deep down, that I’m not going to be able to do jack feces on anything until I get this insanely unimportant, painfully geeky, incredibly minor observation about one particular Jaguar XJ…
As a lifelong taillight obsessive, I’m sort of appalled at myself that I wasn’t aware that these bits of taillight arcana had an actual name. The things I’m referring to are those reflective panels, made of the same plastics and colors as a car’s taillights, that fill in the rear body section between the separate…
I was behind a current-gen Porsche Boxster in traffic today when I noticed something strangely familiar about its brake lights. I’m by no means convinced this was intentional, but that brake light pattern sure reminds me of something else automotive-related. Any idea what that is?
What McLaren’s Design Director Frank Stephenson was inspecting at the Geneva Motor Show is the Bugatti Chiron’s LED taillight, a continuous strip of redness all across the rear. Four years ago, the Volkswagen XL1 couldn’t have that. Here’s why.
The job of a taillight, aside from trapping the mystical red, amber, and clear mischievous sprites that linger around the rear of cars, is communication. They shout out to the world behind you your intent to stop, turn, or reverse. They’re like your hands, or a baboon’s ass in estrus: they talk without saying a word.…
It’s getting darker earlier now that we’ve somehow shoved our clocks back, which means there’s more time for us to contemplate taillights, which is, as we know, the most worthwhile activity a person can do. So, tonight, allow me to submit a set of taillights for your musing: the taillights of the Ford Cirrus.
There’s a lot of things in life we’re so used to, it’s hard to imagine that they’re not just some law of nature, like gravity or running water over the toothpaste on your toothbrush to ‘set’ it. One of these fundamentals is the fact that the rear of cars have red lights on them. But why, exactly, is that? Why red,…
The other day, I made what I assumed was the hardest taillight-identification quiz known to man. I now know I was wrong. Very wrong. The hardest, most badass taillight identification quiz happened in 1990, on a BBC game show. This is the high-water mark for competitive taillight IDing, my friends. Watch and learn.
First, a warning. This article is going to be so geeky, so niche, so insanely VW Beetle-geek focused that those of you not crazily interested in Beetle minutia should probably just close the window now. Really. For those who can hang, get a drop cloth, because minds will be blown, Beetle-taillight-wise.
For some reason, I tend to think about taillights more than a healthy person should. And that thinking recently turned into a vision — a vision of a bold new taillight function that I think could be very helpful: the non-brake-activated stop light.
Last week, I wrote about the deceptive nature of the VW Tiguan's taillights — specifically, that they have an amber section that isn't used for the turn signal. The post proved much more popular than I'd have guessed, and sparked a lot of interesting debate about the use of amber rear indicators. Let's settle this…
Forget everything you thought you knew about taillights and marker lights and indicators. Just let your mind go blank, because it's gonna get blown, my friends. Because Optronics just released their 2014 catalog, and it's a 276-page mind scrambler.
The latest Corvette has gotten a lot of heat about its design, particularly the squared-off tail lights. "It looks like a Camaro!" the critics shout. "Too square!" they cry. "Change bad, round better!" they yell.
The 2014 Corvette Stingray is, for lack of a better term, damn good. I saw it in person at the Detroit Auto Show, sat in it, grabbed the wheel and rocked from side to side while I made engine noises with my mouth, and walked away impressed. It looks and feels like a great American car, and I can't wait to actually…
Okay, everyone, go to the nightstand, get your diaries, and unlock them. Check back around July— see the tear-stained entry where you're lamenting how you knew, just knew you could have done better in the Great Headlight Quiz, but it was too, well, unfair? And how you'd kill for another chance?
After running that B-Roll earlier, we finally got a chance to check out the 2013 Ford Mustang GT's LED sequential taillights down on the LA Auto Show floor. They're even more cool seeing them in person.
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