Pop-up headlights on Jalopnik

The author does explain the reason for them and even supports it over most of the options. Personally from an esthetic view, I prefer the fixed Euro style lights on the Montecarlo with the one-piece top cover and elongated lens. But I tend to prefer the Euro style of most vehicles over the US spec ones. However I am not a Scorpion owner so my opinion does not count. Although I considered buying one at one point and decided I'd convert the lights/grill/spoiler along with a few other changes.

Ed, what's your take on the article? Is it accurate? I don't know enough about these cars to be sure if my understanding is accurate.
 
You know, I am not sure how much of the article is correct. The front end of the Scorpion is much higher than the Montecarlo so it could meet the headlight height requirement. If you look at how the headlight rotates, it just changes the angle of the bulb and not the height, so that isn't really correct. I was always under the impression that the euro style of bulb and lens cover was not DOT legal so this was a solution to use the more standard 7" bulb for the USA. I have see Scorpions with the pop-up mechanism removed and replaced with a fixed headlight and they don't look particularly good. It looks slight better if you do the Lancia Beta quad headlight replacement, but even that looks kind of weird. I suspect the reason they didn't do that from the factory was the weak electronics and cost..

On an engineering side, the Scorpion headlights used a single motor and a bar that went across the two headlight buckets. This worked really well and if the motor failed, it was easy to turn a knob and raise both headlights...

(I just added pictures of my headlights.. I had upgraded them to HID and actually thought they looked really good compared to the standard 7")

Ed
 

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"I was always under the impression that the euro style of bulb and lens cover was not DOT legal so this was a solution to use the more standard 7" bulb for the USA."

I believe this to be the correct reason.
FMVSS 108 regulates vehicle lighting. The minimum height for the headlights is 22”. Additionally, at the time the scorpion was imported, FMVSS 108 only contained requirements for sealed beam headlights now section 12.23. Later (not sure when) FMVSS 108 was amended to include replaceable bulb /lens style. So even if the “Montecarlo style” headlight were the correct height, the vehicle would still not be in compliance of the regulation due to that type of headlight not being covered by the regulation.
 
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Thanks for the conformation.... I do occasionally miss the Scorpion, it was a great road trip car....
 
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