In 1991, automotive columnist Brooks Peterson celebrated the new 1992 Mitsubishi Eclipse for dropping the pop-ups: “Come sunset, up pop the headlights, blasting the carefully worked-out ...

As a child of the 1980s who came of age in the early '90s, pop-up headlights are, in my mind, the peak of automotive cool. All the raddest, most interesting cars of my childhood — Lamborghinis ...

Plenty of Japanese cars embraced pop-up lights, too. For a while there, heaps of JDM cars had them, and makers like Mazda and Toyota were very keen on the concept. Nissan was in on the act at the same ...

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 ...