Luis de Prat

For all those accusing the 924/944 cars of having "Volvo" tail lights.

Here's the Lotus Esprit 1972 concept car.





I believe that 924/944 designers Harm Lagaay, Rudolf Leiding and Tony Lapine clearly looked at Giugiaro's tail light design on the Esprit concept car for inspiration when conceiving the 924/944 rear design in 1974.



For those too young to remember, James Bond drove a white '76 Esprit in "The Spy Who Loved Me" film released in 1977.

Reimu

It's certainly possible, the are quite simular. Honestly I don't think the 944's tailights look that bad, even though I used to think they were pretty ugly.

Just needs a squirt of transparent red model car paint..

Lorax

Guys, just remember - It could be worse

Luis de Prat

1975 Volvo tail lights:

billthe3

I'd say its similar in the fact that there is a orange section, a white section, and a red section. And lights up when you hit the brakes.

Zero10

It's a modular design. By that reasoning you could take everything in our world that is say... square and relate it back to the first famous square thing, whatever that may be.

I feel it is directly in-line with mid-80's VW/volvo lights, but not the esprit, sorry

tifosiman

I just think it is fairly typical of European tail light designs from the 70's and 80's. Especially those made by Bosch.

Volvo 740 sedan tail lights from the mid-80's:

Voith

I like the back lights and back end of 944. it is beautyfull compaired to say 968 back end.. wtf was that.. total lack of style.


the front end is nice but back end looks terrible imo.

SamGrant951

hahaha

tifosiman

I'm just the opposite. I think the perfect combination is the 951 front end and the 968 rear end. Frankly the 944/951 rear end is sorta ugly and contrived. I mean, when they went to the integrated front bumper of the 951, why didn't they do the same for the rear?

alordofchaos

I like the 951 front end, 968 rear end - except for the tail lights. That one red block looks bland.
IMO, of course.

Voith

problem for you is that you have square number plates and that doesn't look good on 944 back end. but eu number plates fit in nice and thus looks a lot better than with square plates.

968 back is just without any kind of imagination, wich is quite contrasting to the front end that is imo nice.

Techno Duck

Volvo 240d...i mentioned this to one of my friends once..and i never hear the end of it now! What a mistake that was...



I think one of the best things one can do is paint the orange turn signal lenses with translucent red. I personally think it takes about 5 years off the already aged look of the rear .

Luis de Prat

You're missing the point. The Volvo 740 tail lights are from 1981!
The 924/944 design is at least 7 years older. Look at what Volvo tail lights were like in 1975 (see above pic).

In 1974, the closest thing to what Porsche put on the 924 were the tail lights on the Lotus Esprit concept car.
Granted, anything that came later could share similarities, but we're talking about the first 924 here, not cars built 7-10 years later.

tifosiman

No, I understand your point. I'm just saying that in the 70's and 80's boxy segmented tail-lights like that were the norm. Perhaps my 740 example above was misleading but I was just showing another Bosch product. One wonders if Porsche designers actually did the tail lights or there was a call for samples and the Bosch product design won out or worked the best. Of course, the early 924 prototypes had a completely different, yet boxy, design: