I Saw Some Great Classic Examples Of The Least-Utilized Type Of Car Lighting At Goodwood

Thanks to a childhood promise made to the late, great funnyman Slappy White, I have an obligation to observe, document, and report on all manner of automotive lighting minutiae. If you don’t believe, me, call the Slappy White Memorial Library in Baltimore, and one of the docents can show you the original signed and notarized document. I’m happy to say that I was able to uphold my agreement with Slappy while at Goodwood this year, when I encountered some fine examples of what I always felt were among the least-understood parts of automotive lighting: sidelights.

Here in America, we tend to call these lights “parking lights,” but they’re not really the same. In the US, parking lights are almost always just the amber turn indicators burning steadily; in the UK (and other Commonwealth nations, and other countries) sidelights need to be separate light units, and must be white, not amber.

There are essentially two tasks asked of the sidelight, one far more common than the other. The more common one is to simply be a position light, not for making the road more visible, but to make the car that possesses the light more visible itself. They’d only be used alone, without full headlamps, in dawn/dusk/severe overcast low-light contexts, when you can see the road well enough, but you may want to be a bit more conspicuous.

They can also act as a sort of backup to headlights, in the sense that if a headlight burns out, the sidelight is there to still help indicate the width of the vehicle, and prevent a car from being mistaken for a motorcycle.

We’ll get to the less common use soon, I promise.

Since Goodwood is in the United Kingdom, the sidelights I encountered were all white/clear, separate and majestic in their own humble manner. Let’s take a look at some of these, starting with what in this context I’ll call “modern,” even though I think the most recent ones of these I photographed were from the 1970s.

Above is a good example of a typical sort of sidelight installation, on a Ford Transit van from the ’60s. These sort of light units, divided between amber indicator and clear sidelight, were extremely common.

While combining the sidelights with an indicator unit became quite common, there were other ways to accomplish the sidelighting challenge; sometimes a small bulb is incorporated into a larger headlamp unit, like on this lovely Facel-Vega:

Some of the cars I saw seemed to use both methods, an inset bulb and a separate indicator-unit, as on this beautiful Lamborghini 350 GT:

There seemed to be a small sidelight bulb inside that (Cibie?) headlamp, and there was a chamber in the indicator unit as well. I’ve never seen one of these with its sidelights on, so I’m not sure if it uses both. Pretty cool, regardless.

Sidelights close to the headlights or indicators became common sometime around the 1950s, I’d think, but prior to that era, you could find them in a variety of places, ranging from fendertops to cowls to the sides of a hood. This Pilain has them at the rear of the hood, by the cowl, a not uncommon place for cars of this era, the 1910s-1920s.

Pilain is not a marque you see often; the French brand made expensive, well-built cars from around 1908 to 1920 or so, and I just wanted to include this shot of this very charming hood ornament of a … traffic cop? Fireman? Gnome? It’s fun.

Sometimes, sidelights would be effectively just miniaturized headlights, like the ones on this Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. They look like intense lights, but they just have a small, low-wattage bulb in there.

These Bentley sidelights have an interesting kind of frosted glass lens that you see on sidelights of this era at times, and on almost no other kinds of lights, which are usually fluted or have fresnel-type lenses.

Some sidelights are incredibly small and delicate, almost jewelry-like, especially when they have faceted lenses, like this one. It also seems to be well equipped for the sidelight’s other, less common use, thanks to this second lens at the rear:

You’ll see this dual-lens setup on a number of these old sidelights, like this one, with an interesting, nearly-spherical clear front lens:

This teardrop-shaped light tapers to a little red lens at the rear:

The reason for this is that sidelights were also intended to be left on when a car is parked at night along the side of a street. I’ve seen references that say they legally must be used when parking a car on the side of a road with a speed limit of 30 mph or greater, but I’ve never really seen this in use any time I’ve been in the UK.

This feature is similar to German-style parking lights that were used on a number of German makes, from VW to Porsche to NSU and so on. These lights were clear (or amber) facing forward, red facing rearward, and would only be illuminated on the side of the car facing the road:

Here’s the Hella unit used on VWs, mostly VW Type 3s; note the clear lens up front, and the red lens behind:

The UK versions would just leave all four lights on while parked – two front sidelights, taillights at the rear – and while that would definitely help your car being spotted on a dark road, I think most people are too nervous about battery life to do this, even if, technically, these little lights shouldn’t draw that much power.

This is all, of course, absurdly trivial, but I’ve always found these tiny lights appealing in a strange way. They’re under-appreciated, and I hope you’ll give them some consideration in your next vehicular lighting reveries.