Sometimes automotive designers will design things that are, if we’re honest, beyond the current capabilities of current technology. This is an understandable urge; you can do a lot of drawings and renderings of what you’d love your car to be, only to be let down by the cruel, crude reality of the state of the world. But many designers try anyway, designing features in cars that can only work in a rudimentary way, when we all know that the version that lives in their imaginations is so very much more. Occasionally, time will pass, technology will catch up, and some under-appreciated hero will step up and give a car a second chance, a chance to realize the potential it was always meant to achieve. This has currently happened, with a 1993 Mercury Sable, one currently for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
The most notable styling feature of the Mercury Sable, the one that truly differentiated it from its Ford Taurus sibling, was the use of a full-width light bar. Sure, the Taurus was one of the pioneers of composite lighting (the 1983 Lincoln Mark VII was actually the first American car to have custom-shaped plastic headlamps) but the Sable arguably was the first to really push the new lighting tech to its boldest expression, a full-width light bar. Today, full-width light bars are becoming quite fashionable for cars, but back when the Sable came out, it was almost unheard of, just a beautiful dream.
Now, the composite lights of the era were impressive, especially when compared to the limiting round or rectangular sealed beams that came before, but they were still just basically simple incandescent lamps. As you can see on the Lincoln here, yes, they could be made flush with the body, but they were still conventional lights.
If you look at how the original Sable light bar was executed, you can see it was just a series of normal 12V bulbs in chambers, and the resulting light was decidedly dim and unimpressive.
This is disappointing, because you know in the designer’s mind, something far more impressive and dramatic had to be playing out. A true light bar, capable of even, powerful light, and possibly even more. Perhaps, even, something like this:
I’m not sure why they decided to use that fake old VHS filter effect, but whatever, you get the idea.
Yes, thanks to modern LED lighting and small, cheap computers, the unrealized dream of the Sable light bar has finally, at long last, been achieved. Sure, others have converted Sable light bars to LED lighting, but as far as I know this is the first example of a true, animated, dynamic Sable light bar. Here’s how its described in the FB ad:
One of the coolest features about this car is the front head light bar, which I upgraded to full LEDs. It also has custom RGB LEDs to change the color of the running lights on the light bar. Light bar has a start up mode when you turn the car on.
This, this is what the Sable lighting designers dreamed of, but couldn’t achieve. Decades of disappointment have been washed away with this skillful re-working and updating of the Sable front end, and you can feel the latent, burning desire in old Sable commercials, where hints like that lighthouse were incorporated to represent the dream, still unrealized, of a truly magical light bar:
Later ads show how they just sort of gave up, never even showing the light bar – arguably the Sable’s most distinctive styling element – illuminated:
All that shame is gone now, thanks to intrepid lighting experimenters like this Seaside, California Sable owner. Fantastic work, and I’m sure the original lighting team appreciates the efforts taken to bring their work to the level that they always knew and hoped it could achieve.
What a magical time we live in.
Much as I’d hate to have it blast my eyes on the road, that’s p. rad. Otherwise, those lightbars only ever looked to me like the lights on vacuum cleaners of the time.
Faux VHS effects: no thanks
Sampled wet panties hitting the ground used as drum beats: yes please
My cat’s name is Sable. When we adopted her, I had to explain to my wife that despite the shelter naming her after the weasel-y animal, I could only think Mercury.
But then again the Sable was the semi-upmarket version of America’s best attempt at a mid-sized sedan, with a lightbar. I decided it was a noble name, much like the vehicle, so we didn’t change it.
It was also the name of a very short lived ’80s action adventure tv show about an author whose secret identity was a mercenary who’d help ordinary people out of trouble!
This is temptingly close to me…
Oh. My. God. I love this so much! SO much!
More of this, people. More of this sort of rest-modding. Take something old and really make it better – don’t stop at engine swap and rims.
Oh sure, feed my craving to buy an SVX and fancy up the front and rear light bars like this, thanks!
How about a scanning red dot? Not like KITT, though.
Like a Cylon.
Only if you include the whaUm-whaUm sound effect piped out to the grille.
Since the seller states that RGB LEDs were used, should be a case of programming the right light show to make it happen.
Also “By Your Command” when the key is inserted.
I always wondered if the tiny LED controller in my RC drift car would be enough to make this possible full size.
Make it color changing lights and it could be cool for an emergency vehicle.
Torch, can the Sable light bar please be the MacGuffin in the next Mack Hardigraw series?!?! I’d love to hear more from Bladderworth and Clamford at the Lumière Rouge.
I always thought the Sable was the coolest for its lightbar! I wanted to get one and mod it like this!
I’ve always loved the Sables and their cool warmly lit light bar. Definitely ahead of the time. However, I hate these retina searing not kind to the human eye bright white LED lights in vogue now (shocked they are even legal). Bad enough I have to have asshole bro dozer little pecker truck behind me with his accessory led light bar that is not needed in the metroplex (We have freeway lighting fricknut) blaring in my review mirrors full blast causing me to go temporally blind. Now I have to worry about vintage Sables blinding me too? Wow, I’d better get to confession, the world is ending soon LOL
What a
Supremely Amazing Beautiful Light Exhibition
Indeed it seems as if the light bar has swung back around after a few decades. From the front of car, like Mecurys and Pontiacs, to the back of the car Dodge Stealth and more, the light bar was the look of the future. Ironically, stylists look to the past. I’m seeing it again on cars as expensive as a $200k Lucid Air.
Did anyone else notice that the black canopy is back? That was a styling feature on Eagle Talons and Dodge Stealths way back when.
I always liked that black canopy for its subtle contrast effect, the way it broke up the usually-blob-esq expanse of color otherwise.
The current Ford Escape has a light bar across the front as an option!
As someone who grew up in the ’80s, I can state with confidence that none of us were going around thinking, “Man, you know what’s cool about tech right now? Terrible chroma bandwidth.”
Still, as awful as NTSC/VHS were, they never looked as bad as the absurd pastiches ginned up by overly-nostalgic video editors now. You’d think every TV made before 1994 was thrown down a flight of stairs before first use with the way people slather the effects on. *Cringe*
IDC
It’s on the same tier as people who compressor crunch music so it sounds “like tape” or games that implement CRT filters that just blur the screen. It seems as if they’re all made by people who’ve only ever seen or heard such hardware through Youtube videos. VHS tapes had higher quality than early digital signal 720p TV!
Not sure how you figure that:
“VHS horizontal resolution is 240 TVL, or about 320 lines across a scan line. The vertical resolution (number of scan lines) is the same as the respective analog TV standard (625 for PAL or 525 for NTSC; somewhat fewer scan lines are actually visible due to overscan and the VBI). In modern-day digital terminology, NTSC VHS resolution is roughly equivalent to 333×480 pixels for luma and 40×480 pixels for chroma. 333×480=159,840 pixels or 0.16 MP (1/6 of a megapixel).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
Given broadcast TV was 480i at the time there was no point going any better. When DVDs came out the first players put out a 480i signal to be compatible. Even so they were a revelation in quality even compiled to super VHS. The only downside was not being able to record.
The closest 720p resolution was 960x720p which is way better than DVD.
– Someone who remembers the dark days.
It was moreso the data density rather than the actual resolution. Early 720p TV over broadcast had terrible colour reproduction and had massive amounts of artifacting because the bitrate was so low. That meant that dark scenes had big blue and grey splotches, and that after-imaging would happen on bright frames. Audio was also worse quality, especially on major networks like ABC or CBS that had others rebroadcast their signals, partially because of the low bitrate, but partially because early digital TV audio decoding hardware was made very cheaply.
I had both a 2006 Vizio 32″ flatscreen in the living room and a 2002 32″ Sanyo CRT in the bedroom, and watching VHS tapes or playing my Gamecube on the CRT over RCA always resulted in a cleaner and clearer image than sitting with my family watching Lost or Viva La Bam over YPbPr or later HDMI in the living room. That stayed true until around 2010 when almost every network finally switched over to all digital 16:9 broadcasting.
That sounds like digitizing and upscaling issues rather than signal itself.
Maybe it was your particular setup or your station. I think there would have been a lot more pushback from viewers had that been the situation everywhere. Nobody would have bothered buying a HDTV if their big screen sportsball looked worse than an old sportsball game on VHS.
FWIW I STILL use a 2006 Olevia 42″ 720p/1080i HDTV as my main TV. I’ve thought many times about upgrading to a fancy OLED or something but I find the newer TV is not THAT much better for the DVDs I rely on. It looks pretty good with BluRays too.
DVDs and everything sure, yeah. Those early TVs are great for that. Even better if you reroute the audio to a home stereo to get past the cheap DACs they came with. I later got that Vizio TV and kept it until I knocked something into the screen in 2016 and broke it beyond repair. Picture quality from source over HDMI can’t improve much so there wasn’t much point in upgrading. But actual cable TV was sooo much worse back then. Doesn’t matter if you used RCA, YPbPr, coaxial, or HDMI, it all had digital artifacting and sounded like the audio came from a KaZaA rip. It was all down to the compression they used for everything, and my god did they compress the fuck out of data streams in those first few years to save on money. Clarity was better than analogue, but quality was worse and stayed worse for about five or six years.
Youtube, Google Video (remember that?), and DailyMotion were worse quality in 2006, but by 2009 Youtube was letting you upload 6MB/s h.264(MPEG-4) 1080p video files, and TV was still using 2MB/s h.262(MPEG-2) 720p ATSC signals for most channels. The difference was really noticeable.
Yeah, like there’s a level of it that works, because you can absolutely exaggerate something to get a point across, but after a while it’s more about the effect than the rest of that shot. I get what the video maker was going for but they should have dialed down every slider available to 25% AT MOST of what they did (and put in some more obviously vaporwave music to make it all work cohesively, the stuff they put in was mid-tier at best).
This effect is not too far off what I remember of an old, worn out home recording in a dirty, poorly calibrated player though.
I beg to differ. As someone who grew up in the 80’s and watched plenty of VHS both rented and home recorded those effects were spot on for a tape that had been watched to death.
Hello everyone! My wife showed me this article about 20mins ago. I was shocked, “HEY! THATS MY SABLE!” I said.
Yes, I am the owner of the 93 Sabel with the “Sablewave” (As I call it) lights. My buddy owns a 93 sable as well, (his is the 3.8) and he copied the RGB light set up as well. If I could image comment I’d show the both of them off with the lights going.
Away, I’m surprised that this sable made it to a automotive news letter. I’m honored, really. XD
Nice job! When I saw the headline I was expecting just a block of blinding LED lights but that is really cool
Nice video.
I’m always up for some good old VHS Sable porn.
I generally don’t have OCD, but I always had an irrational fit of it whenever I saw one segment of the Sable light bar unlit. I’m not sure if it was the incompleteness of the lights or the lack of symmetry, but it bugged me enough that I once helped a friend-of-a-friend replace a headlight bulb on his Sable simply so I could also fix the burned out light bar segment next to do failed headlight.
“I’m not sure why they decided to use that fake old VHS filter effect”
…
I think everyone knows why they used the VHS effect
This is pretty sweet, and $3K is a cheap way to impress everyone at Radwood, as long as the transmission doesn’t eat itself on the way to the show.
And you’d better not make any red and blue light combo, or the cops are gonna be right on you.
Strictly speaking, blue isn’t allowed even when not combined with red, and you’re not supposed to have red on the front of your car either. In most states, it’s illegal to add lights any color other than amber to the front of your car.
Ever been to Texas?
Yes, I drove this on a road trip earlier this year to Texas and back. Did you slot my sable? ????
I see this all the time in Ohio; they’re always red, except when they’re green or purple. And they’re always on a Jeep, except when they’re on a Challenger. No one bats an eye, just like nobody cares when people are checking facebook while they’re driving.
Hello, the owner here. 🙂
I haven’t been pulled over with the rainbow fade lights running at sunset while going down the road, or idling in a parking lot at night.
Yes, there is an option to run Red and Blues in a Knight Rider sweeping effect. But I would never try it out on the road! Haha
So, in the south & southeast, tow trucks and contractors all display red & blue lights.
Haven’t had any problems with this ol girl.
Bought it from the original family after their grandma passed. If ya don’t treat it like a race car these will give you plenty of reliable miles.
Bought it at 85k and it now sits at 110k. She’s been well taken care off. <3
As a former Ford tech who used to be able to literally, with no exaggeration, be able to pull a Taurus or Windstar transmission with my eyes closed because I did it so often, I refute some of your statements, but I’m happy yours is running well!
“the 1983 Lincoln Mark VII was actually the first American car to have custom-shaped plastic headlamps”
They weren’t plastic.
They were glass.
Even my 1989 Tracer had glass headlamps
As the former owner of a Mark VII (but admittedly 20+ years ago) I am 99% positive they were composite. The yellowing on this one seems to corroborate my memory.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/403741686863
And yep, just asked on the Lincoln Mark VII Club FB group I’m a member of (I’m a Fox platform nerd) and they confirmed it’s plastic.
Ugh, the beginning of the end for housings that last. I was actually surprised to find out my dad’s ’01 V70 uses glass housings—no wonder they still look brand-new after 20-odd years in the California sun. Too bad Volvo went to plastic in the facelift.
yes, but glass is heavy and hard. I am sure fuel economy ratings, and pedestrian “crush” ratings had something to do with the switch to plastic lenses on headlights. The headlights on my 17 wrx look almost like new, no yellowing after 8 years (August ’16 manufacturing date, had it since oct ’16). The 05 legacy i used to have before are a different story after 3 years. I think the coatings came a long way.
Plastic on my 2010 Altima with 205,000 miles is perfectly clear while the plastic on my 2010 CX-7 with 140,000 miles is constantly of clouding up. Don’t get me started on Toyota crap.
don’t get me started on the darlings of atopian and jalopnik, toyota, hyundai and kia crap.
There were plenty of vehicles continued to use glass lenses for a while after the original sealed beam lamps fell out of fashion. GM used glass at least through my 1999 Saturn SL2. MCI used glass lenses through their 2012 J4500 coaches. I’ve heard that specialty glass used in their manufacture is no longer available.
Volvo were odd about that, although I suppose, thinking about it, it might’ve been a prestige distinction. ’86+ 240s and ’90+ 740s (and base/later-production 940s) had plastic lenses, but 760s, fancier 940s, and 960s had glass headlamp lenses with plastic-lensed fog/driving lights inset between them and the grille. I was a bit surprised to find that my old 850 had glass lenses after owning a few late 240s and a ’92 740.
No, they were polycarbonates known under brand name, Lexan: the same material was used for the cockpit canopy on the fighter planes. The only difference is that the military used the special coating that reduces or prevents UV damage that leads to yellowing and clouding surface.
NHTSA had initially required the special coating, but Ford threw the temper tantrum over the cost (about 20 to 50 cents per unit). So, NHTSA rescinded. Had NHTSA the balls to stand up to Ford, we would not have to experience the yellowing and clouding issues today…
Mercury Tracer was based on Australian Ford Laser (KE), which was derived from Mazda 323 (BF). So, the headlamps had glass lenses albeit different output pattern on lens and bulbs.
This is a great urban legend. It has all the elements needed. ????
Well, if you bother to read the car magazines and Automotive News from the early 1980s, you will know what am I saying about it. That means visiting the public library that has them in physical form: something that you don’t want to do, anyway.
The polycarbonate lens was a huge deal in the early 1980s as it had never been fitted to the automobiles prior to 1984 Lincoln Mark VII so it was widely covered by the magazines.
Definitely an improvement.
It was the first thing it did to it! 🙂
That’s pretty cool – reminds me of the Dodge Charger police cars in the underappreciated Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) movie In Time.
And the VHS effect is often part of the whole synthwave thing, representing the tech of the time. Just needs more gray gridlines!
Andrew Niccol always puts a lot of effort into the cars in his movies.
I love his taste for deep cuts too – Clive Owen’s Olds Toronado in Anon (positively IDed as such even, given the movie’s conceit) is amazing.
I felt it set the mood perfectly! ????