Pop-up headlights can certainly make an impression when a classic vehicle rolls up, but which car actually sported the ...

It’s a stock visual in any 1980s movie montage: A character jumps into a cool sports car, revs the engine, and activates the pop-up headlights. Violating the speed limit inevitably follows.

Pop-up lights are, to this day, one of the most memorable things about this generation of Japanese cars, and the MX-5 or Miata pop-up headlights continue to define the design in a visual sense. That ...

Ok, hear me out: Pop-up headlights. I refer to that throwback relic of a time when cars were so pointy, the only way you could engineer a headlight to point forward was to mount it on a swivel.

It hardly seemed to matter. Pop-up headlights were considered, at various peaks from the ’60s to the ’90s, the height of cool. Safety legislation and the emergence of visible headlight ...