Pontiac Grand Am Headlights

Headlamp performance has steadily improved throughout the automobile age, spurred by the great disparity between daytime and nighttime traffic fatalities: the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that nearly half of all traffic-related fatalities occur in the dark, despite only 25% of traffic travelling during darkness.

In 1983, the 44-year-old US headlamp regulations were amended to allow replaceable-bulb, nonstandard-shape, architectural headlamps with aerodynamic lenses. The first U.S.-market car since 1939 with composite headlamps was the 1984 Lincoln Mark VII. These composite headlamps were commonly referred to as "Euro" headlamps, since aerodynamic headlamps were common in Europe. Though conceptually similar to European headlamps with nonstandardised shape and replaceable-bulb construction, these headlamps conform to the SAE headlamp standards of US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108, and not the internationalised European safety standards used outside North America. Nevertheless, this change to US regulations largely united headlamp styling within and outside the North American market.