Taillights are important. They serve a valuable purpose in terms of safety of course, notifying you that the car ahead is slowing down. But they’re also the part on any car that you end up looking at the most. We’ve discussed our favorite taillights in the past, but today we’re paying tribute specifically to those that really were ahead of their time.
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Which pair of taillights is at the top of this author’s list? Ah, there are so many to consider. The Maserati 3200GT’s set of rear lights were decidedly futuristic for 1998, with their boomerang shape following the contours of the rear decklid and the LED strips housed within them. Of course LEDs might be commonplace on everything from Aston Martins to Nissan Sentras now, but for 25 years ago, this was space-age stuff.
The story goes that prolific designer Frank Stephenson was forced by his superior at Ferrari and Maserati at the time to order the legendary Giorgetto Giugiaro to change the shape of the lamps for the 4200GT refresh, even though Stephenson believed Giugiaro’s idea was a masterstroke.
Another shout out that also pioneered LED tech in automotive lighting that very same year was the BMW Z8. The Z8's lamps sandwiched the amber turn signal portion above the red braking portion for a very simple, elegant design that was impossible to mistake for any other car’s. They would have looked far more boring if they were strictly red, which is probably what would happen if the Z8 was built today.
Correction: The Z8's lights are actually neon tubes, not LEDs, as Rollk1 informed us. That’s why they look ever cooler than LEDs!
But enough out of me and my rose-tinted glasses. I now leave it to you to tell us and your fellow commenters: what taillights across automotive history truly broke the mold, that you remember most fondly today?