Next time you admire the sculpted headlight clusters on a modern car — the swept LED signatures, the jewel-like projector lenses — spare a thought for what American designers had to work with for more than four decades. For 43 years, a single federal regulation forced every car sold in the United States to wear the same standardized sealed-beam headlights, regardless of what the designer had envisioned. It sounds like a minor technical footnote, but the ripple effects on American automotive styling were enormous — and the story of how that law came to be, evolved, and finally died is one of the more fascinating footnotes in car history.
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