Yahoo Autos 10 Sports Cars That Borrowed Headlights and Taillights From Other Cars
Cars sharing parts. It happens all the time, but it often happens under the surface, where body panels must be peeled back to reveal components manufactured by a common source.
That’s not the case with these 10 performance and luxury cars that borrowed headlights and taillights from more modest nameplates. This was especially common in the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s, at a time when sealed beams had fallen off in usage and low-volume brands lacked the resources to design their own bespoke clusters.
Read more
Perhaps you knew of some of the following examples; perhaps you’re learning about them for the first time. In either case, get ready to never, ever unsee the resemblance. Let’s go.
1999-2001 Lamborghini Diablo and Nissan 300ZX (Z32)
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.
Lister Storm and Audi 80 (B3)
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.
Morgan Aero 8 Series 1 and Volkswagen New Beetle
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.
Lotus Esprit (X180) and Toyota Corolla Levin (AE86)
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.
Noble M400 and Hyundai Sonata (EF)
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.
