This Is The Car Part That Looks Most Like A Little Version Of A Whole Car

There’s a strange thing I’ve noticed for years but I don’t believe I’ve ever actually spoken about, at least not publicly. It’s about what I believe to be the only common car part that really and strangely resembles a whole, complete car. Well, not exactly complete; it’s more of a car part that looks like the front end of a completed car, complete with bodywork, headlights, turn indicators, hood/grille area, bumpers, a sense of specific style, and so on. But it’s just a part of a car, and it’s a pretty mundane part, too: a dome light assembly. The specific type of dome light I’m thinking of is one that incorporated a dome light and two independently switched map/reading lamps as well. The one I think of the most was used on GM cars from around 1970 to the mid-1980s, though Ford had a very similar version that was used around the same time period, and I remember these being in Ford trucks, especially. I call this strange visual recursiveness the Dome Light Phenomenon, and I really want to show it to you.

Here’s the part I’m thinking of:

Our own David Tracy remembered this very unit is in the Jeep Cherokee Golden Eagle we dragged across America, so he took some pictures of it for me:

Actually, it looks like he has two! One mounted on the ceiling and with a brown-black plastic case, which I’ve not seen before, and then he also has one of the more common chrome ones, there on the floor. He also kindly pointed out the novel little tabbed round spring thing that holds the hemispherical lens in place for the map/reading light! 

I know you’ve seen these before. They’re almost always on American cars (though I think some GM subsidiaries like Holden in Australia used these, too) and because they’re usually overhead, you may not have felt that they look particularly car-front-like. But, if you flip them 180° from their usual orientation and use your imagination to fill in the rest of the car, the standard GM Deluxe Dome Lamp with Map Lights actually makes a pretty attractive-looking car, at least in my head. Here’s how I always see it:

There’s something almost, I don’t know, 1975ish Chevy Vega-like about the look of it? I think it’s pretty attractive; sometimes I see a Porsche-like look there, if I choose not to imagine a radiator grille on the front of the plastic translucent ivory plastic that forms the Dome Light Car’s hood. And look how the switches for the map/reading lights perfectly become where the turn indicators would be! It just works!

The proportions are just so, well, car-like that I can’t help but wonder if some entry-level designer with big dreams yet condemned to crank out interior miscellanea like door handles and armrests and dome lights saw the dome light job as a clandestine opportunity to make their dreams of a full car design a reality, at least in small scale and, you know, only partially. Maybe this dome light is the front end of an incredibly beautiful car that we never got to see, except in this highly truncated and secret form?

If that is the case, this happened more than once, since Ford’s version of this same sort of dome light is a bit different, and lends itself to a different sort of car:

The slightly boxier and more upright Ford dome light seems to suggest a more upright kind of luxury car, something with a lot of dignity, like a late-1960s Mercedes-Benz or perhaps a Lincoln.

I’ve started the process of seeing if the designer of this dome lamp may be able to be found; if that’s possible, and I can locate the designer, I’ll ask them if the intent was to mimic an automotive front end, or if I’m just perpetually delirious. I also need to get one of these from a junkyard and try to use it to make a little sculpture of the full Dome Light Car, too.

That seems important.