These Are The Best And Most Important Taillights Of Monterey Car Week

I know you’ve been waiting for this. We all have. I feel like it’s one of the most important by-products of Monterey Car Week, when I have the honor of going out amongst the cars and carefully scrutinizing and scouring all of their rear ends to evaluate and curate the most interesting of all the taillights, and then present those findings to you, so that you can reflect upon them, and use their beauty, novelty, and overall taillightitude to better guide your life.

Yes, it’s time for the annual Car Week Taillight Roundup.

This year brought an excellent array of taillights; there were a number that I had encountered before, but there were also plenty of novel examples I’d never encountered before that had some truly breathtaking qualities. It’s humbling, really, when you finally free yourself from the misguided notion that you’ve seen all that the world of taillights has to offer, because that is never true. There is always a dazzling unseen taillight out there, glowing redly on the horizon. Let’s take a look at these taillights!

Why not start with something beautiful? This pair of botanical-inspired taillights are from a stunning 1948 Delahaye 135 MS Faget-Varnet Cabriolet; the taillights are inset into the chrome trim that hugs the graceful line of the vender, and have a smart central crease, like a smartly pressed pair of slacks.

The shape of the lenses feel like flower petals, the upper red one slightly longer than the lower amber lens, and they have a bit of an Art Nouveau feeling to them. Just a stunning example of how simplicity and elegance can inform the tailightric arts.

Let’s keep going with these extremely arty taillights. Here we have something fiercely Art Deco, the lights on a 1934 Avions Voisin C23/24 Roadster by Saliot, which I wrote about earlier, wondering about the symbols on its dashboard knobs.

Look at that taillight! It’s so beautiful and kind of impractical; there’s two lenses, and neither points quite the way you’d expect. The larger, lower round lens points downwards, and I suspect you’d mostly see the glow from this light in its reflection on the fender. That tiny red lens up top fits the contours of the stepped lamp housing, and I suspect must have been the running light, with the larger lens for the brake lamp? I think so, at least.

These lights are almost more jewelry than signal light, really, but they are stunning.

The famous 1937 Delage D8-120-S Pourtout Aérodynamic Coupé by Pourtout has a lone, large, triangular-shaped lamp below the license plate there: it may function primarily as the brake lamp, fitting in the lower part of this heart-shaped housing. Aside from a license plate illuminating lamp, the car has no other rear lamps of any sort.

Also interesting is the typography of the customized license plate; those chrome letters look so much like the Susan Kare-designed Chicago font designed for the early Apple Macintosh in 1983 or so. I’ve been trying to find if there was some earlier precursor to the Chicago font, but so far I’ve not really found anything. Perhaps this is a more recent addition/restoration?

This simple and odd “showerhead” style taillight/license plate lamp was on a Rolls-Royce, though I’ve seen them on other cars, too. I like how proudly mechanical this one feels. Almost like plumbing hardware.

This interesting little nosecone of a lamp from a classic Ferrari reminds me of something really, really specific: have you ever sucked on a red/cherry Tootsie Pop to the point where the outer candy shell is just wearing away and the inner Tootsie core is getting revealed? That taillight up there looks exactly like that! The amber center is nearly the perfect shade of Tootsie golden brown, and that red plastic lens has almost the same specular qualities of red-flavored lollipop. It’s uncanny.

This is a nice teardrop-shaped unit from a Jordan; note that the stop lamp section up top does contain the word STOP, an addition I always appreciate. While there’s plenty of taillights that incorporate the text STOP, this is the first one with this teardrop shape that I’ve seen.

I think this is the taillight that surprised and delighted me the most at the show, because it’s such an unexpected design, a format that I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever encountered before in the vast panoply of taillights: the streetlamp.

I can’t think of another car – other than this particular 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Lungo Touring Spider – that has lighting like this, a vertical post mounting a cylindrical lens that gives a full 360° of illumination, much like a miniature street light. It’s incredibly odd, and wildly cool. The turn indicators follow the same formula, too, just with an amber lens:

There were never many of these impressive prewar sports cars made, and only five of these long-wheelbase Touring-bodied spiders are left today, and I think this is the only one with this fascinating lighting setup, which I suspect was added later in the car’s life.

These lights have an almost nautical lantern feel, too; I’m really taken by them, even though they don’t exactly fit the overall aesthetic of the car exactly, but somehow they just work.

As usual, Voisin delivers the best of gleefully industrial-looking taillights, like what we see on this 1935 C28 Aérosport Coupé. I’ve seen similar Voisin taillights like these – unashamedly minimalistic, with exposed bulbs, huge, emphasized fasteners, and very light construction.

But I think the even more interesting thing is that PASSEZ light.

I’m not entirely sure. how these were used, if I’m honest; it’s at the rear, so I think it’s to indicate to the person behind you that it’s safe for them to pass you on a two-lane road? Is that what these were for? If so, that’s a wonderfully useful lamp, albeit one that demands a good amount of mutual trust among drivers. I’ll try and do some more research on these.

At another extreme from the minimalistic Voisin taillights are these delightfully Art Deco taillights on this 1940s Packard One Eighty. They feel like an architectural detail even more than an automotive one, and I could picture these as sconces by an elevator in some downtown New York skyscraper, which you see as you get on to go up to the floor where you have a meeting with a private detective who is currently taking a big swig of scotch from the bottle he keeps in his desk drawer.

Also, that add-on reverse lamp is no joke.

There’s also taillight beauty to be found in the aging and fading processes, as well, if you look for it. Take the lovely taillights on this 1954 Ferrari 250 Europa GT Vignale Coupé: they have a lovely almost quilt-like pattern of texturing on the inside of the lens, and time and sunlight have altered the lenses colors a bit, making the upper red lens into this peach-to-scarlet ombré effect, and giving the lower clear reversing lamp a subtle golden saffron-like tint. They’re so much better now than if they were pristine.

But the lens fading that really dazzled me was on this late-’60s Maserati Mexico coupé. These lenses, which were once amber on the outside, red on the middle section, have been sun-bleached to the point where the lenses look like they’re the color of mead, or perhaps over-vitimin’d urine.

The lenses are free of any fluting, so they’re quite transparent, easily showing the bulbs and reflectors within, looking like they’ve been frozen in amber. Sure, these lights probably are no longer legally compliant, but they’re quite beautiful, I think.

There are contexts were mostly-amber taillights were once a thing, of course. This old Rolls-Royce is from the era where you could have amber brake lamps, so those taillights are pretty much all amber, save for the red retroreflector.

I have to throw in a Ford Cortina taillight whenever I see one, regardless of what car it’s been stuck on, because they’re fantastic.

Look at this sassy fella! It looks like its wearing one of those ancient Roman or Greek helmets with the crest on them. This taillight is on a 1948 Delahaye 135 M Cabriolet “Vedette” by Chapron, and while they’re quite small, they have plenty of drama about them, which fits the overall look of the car. I hope that upper red crest illuminates as well; I bet these lenses throw some nice light patterns over the curved metal behind them.

Here’s another reminder of the importance of visual texture and simplicity: this is a taillight from the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300B Pinin Farina Coupé, and what makes this taillight work is it’s remarkable balance of integration and separation. It has a shape that perfectly follows the elegant curve of the fender, and fits into the fender flush – but then, it’s also circumscribed by a relatively thick chrome bezel, with an outer and inner bead of chrome.

The bezel keeps the taillight a separate entity, while the shape integrates it into the overall form. It’s two conflicting concepts that somehow work in harmony to make something that’s greater than a sum of its parts.

The Studebaker Avanti’s taillights operate on a similar principle: formed to mesh with the shapes of the body panels they’re on, but still retaining chrome bezels. They’re a coherent part of the design, and also jewelry, at the same time.

This Ferrari 212 T.51 with a Vignale body has some wonderful examples of Frenched-in taillights. The lights and lenses themselves aren’t necessarily shaped to the car, but they’re inset into the bodywork, making them look more flush and part of the design. The chrome lining inside the recess adds a nice bit of bling to the whole thing, too.

Who wants a little burst of really early oil lamp-type taillights, but all blinged out? You do!

I appreciate how all of these lantern-type lights contain a separate window with a clear lens to illuminate the license plate, and some even include what we would now consider side marker lamp lenses, a good 40 or 50 years before they were legally required!

These Pierce-Arrow taillights are a great example of how important a taillight’s housing can be: the lights themselves are pretty basic off-the-shelf round units with fluted lenses. But the housing they’re inset into, contouring to the sharp creases of the fender and having that widow’s peak shape, transforms what could have been a fairly generic taillight setup into something unique and tailored for the car.

These are similar: off-the-shelf nosecone-type round lights, but inset into little chrome bezels that, in the placement on the fender and with the overall design, now feel like jet engine exhausts or something. Packaging is important!

I wish I could recall what this car was; I remember we were talking about its unusual color and even made a reel about it that has yet to be published. Crap, what was this? Oh well, let me just note this interesting taillight, because it has a second clear window in the front, making it a sort of strangely-rear-set sidelight as well. It reminds me of those truck turn signals that have red and amber lenses, one per side, just, you know, classier.

This has been a lot of incredible taillights, and I don’t want to overwhelm you, so we’ll leave it here for now, and I encourage you to take some time and reflect on each and every one of these, taking all of the taillight wisdom you can from them.

It’s good for the soul.