Headlights are an incredibly simple part of an otherwise complex and complicated machine, so when most designers get to that part they are shocked by a lack of restrictions like safety or weight distribution and so, from time to time, they royally screw it up. To add to the confusion of "artistic expression" and a car's "character," the pop-up headlight rolled around, created space for some wild ideas.
It left almost as quickly for "pedestrian safety" reasons and left a vacuum in the car design world. You may notice most of these cars are from that era where executives and designers stood around like deer in the headlights (heh) and waited for each other to try things first. Even in modern cars, there are lights that simply shouldn't exist!
10 Porsche 928
During the heat of the pop-up era, the affordable 928 decided to reinvent the already-permissible pop-up. The result ware two chrome-plated ice cream cones that remained exposed to the elements all day and then popped up the wrong way to shine at night. Despite looking strangely out of place the headlights stayed from 1977 to 1995.
Now, specialized replacements exist that really let you enjoy the un-Porsche look of the simple but elegant 928. Consequently, these lights are on eBay for a dime a dozen, and it's doubtful anyone's going to be picking them up too fast.
9 Oldsmobile Toronado
Nowadays fans drag their heels whenever they see what looks like an air intake or part of a grill but isn't. In a surprisingly futuristically-minded move, Oldsmobile said "darn the headlights!" and stretched the grill all the way across. Unfortunately for them, we are not bats.
The full-length grille had to be broken up by visible slots and obvious fake panels to make way for the four-eyed square headlights that were offset and unattractive in the daylight, so much that it took us a good few hours to find you a picture (above). Despite this, the shifter was a Batmobile-style handle connected on both sides.
8 Cizeta V16T
You may have seen what looks like a Lamborghini Countach with four eyes and thought it was some unfunny joke of Photoshop, yet it's not. The Cizeta (Moroder) V16T was not made in the early 80s but came in between 1991 and 1995. The Italian car was a collaboration between famed designer Marcello Gandini and... a musician? Giorgio Moroder is said to be the father of disco and also modern electronic dance music.
Marcello did say in an interview that his designs are made for the car's benefit, not the viewer. Thus, the quadruple-pop-up was born! Despite many not even being able to sit in the driver's seat, the actual result of the purely practical sports car was impressive in the daytime. As the numbers indicate, it was a 6.0-L V-16 Turbo from Lamborghini.
7 Fiat Multipla
The Multipla has long since secured its spot on the top ugliest cars list, so you may have seen it before, but we now draw your attention to the headlights... (sorry). You may think the top ones by the windshield were high beams, or maybe the lowest ones are fog lights? Sadly, no. Every single one equals the daytime running lights and night lights, turning to just the bottom for fog.
Maybe it's a symbolic indication of how the two-row SUV can fit three people on each row, or maybe it was a joke that got sent to production by accident, but the little dots of headlights really seal the deal on the whole squished-jellyfish look.
6 Citroen Ami 6
Just as important as headlights are the lines around and leading up to it. Looking at this car we get the sense that the designer wanted to be "different" and so made a window that slanted the wrong way and stuck with that one aspect to the grave. This and the Ford Taunus P3 tied for the first oblong, non-circular headlight design on a production car.
Perhaps that's why it looks so strange. The rectangles are encircled by chrome as if embarrassed by its revolutionary headlight shape. With the hood sagging down like silly putty it looks like the car is always suspicious of you with a pair of judgemental headlights staring you down.
5 Alfa Romeo Brera
Hey! Who took my headlight cover off? No one. The Alfa Brera comes like that. Three dots are receded and seemingly unprotected peaking out from under the hood. The coupe-hatchback monstrosity looks like it was just about to jump into hyperdrive with its long nose and shrunken grille.
A closer look reveals what looks like a recycled tin cup holding the small halogen housing in place. Even stranger is that each of the lights serves a different purpose so looking down the barrel might irk you with the inconsistency. The page of Italdesign pats itself on the back endlessly for its design of this Italian Chrysler Crossfire, only taking a break to call the coolest feature on the car "hedonistic": the scissor doors.
4 Nissan Juke
The Juke is such a crappy car that Grand Tour went out of their way to make this hilarious segment berating it. Richard Hammon even calls out its headlights, "You see it on the motorway with its stupid double-bug eyes! Smug little ba-!" The new Juke, apparently, is so ashamed of its headlights that they just squished them into a flat little line that looks entirely unusable.
But not soon enough. The slow, ugly, blub-like car tried to stand apart by having a unique style when it should've just taken after the Frontier and had a squared-off front end. It didn't. The signal lights stick a total of three inches over the hood so that the driver can see whether they're on or not. I guess that's something Juke drivers need.
3 TVR Tuscan
Some say that the TVR Tuscan was the model for Mr. Increadible's car, and we see why. The key difference being that a superhero can't be seen driving with a vertical stack of three identical dots. It was made between 1967 and 1971 in England and frankly, we wish it wasn't.
If the billet-style grille that looks like it's sucking on the road wasn't enough, the arrangement is even worse. Fo no real reason, there are two normal headlights with a tiny dot of a third on the inside. The top circle is a turn signal. Admittedly, the hood had a lot of potential. It was almost ahead of its time! It could've even been decent but that pesky little speck light remains... It's not even a pattern!
2 Buick Riviera (Any of them)
During the age of widening grills, the first-generation Buick Riviera came in 1963 with headlights on the very side of the front. They weren't pop-ups or fixed. They were hidden by a design even worse than the Oldsmobile Toronado. The appearance is that of a grille, but the physical shape is clearly the edge of the bumper?
In the span of just that generation, they released a sloppy fix for their hated headlights, making little horizontal squares. Heck! Any generation through to its end in 1999 is all garbage, ending up looking like a flat sloth. How it made it so far is a mystery.
1 Hyundai Tiburon RD2
No, not R2D2 or Red Dead Redemption 2. You may say that this looks just like a Celica, and it does. In fact, the four headlight design wasn't uncommon except that for one, this is a Hyundai and for two, it just did it so much worse. The Celica was not only a decent car but it also handled its separate high-beam headlights better.
The Tiburon made sure that the location of the headlights could be found from the side doors via massive protrusions... or maybe they were just making the rest of the car as low as possible? And for the grand finale, I'd like to point out how not even the Celica needed five different ports for headlights of totally different designs. Five!