I know everyone who is even considering plopping down several wet paper bags full of cash for the upcoming 2020 Ford Bronco is most likely waiting to pull the trigger based on the reveal of one crucial detail: the Bronco’s new taillights. We’ve seen what seems to be the leaked headlights, and now, thanks to a reader named Eric spotting a disguised Bronco testing in Michigan, we have a peek at the new Bronco’s taillights.
From what we can see behind the obscuring disguise-mesh, the taillights appear to be rectangular, with the taillight function itself seeming to be handled by an LED-illuminated outer rim.
Interestingly, it does not appear that the outer border is entirely illuminated, with the bottom side being dark on both lights, though the passenger side lamp has a small portion illuminated. Is this a design choice, or a malfunction? It’s not clear yet.
The interior of the taillight will likely house the brake lamp and likely the turn indicator, though we can’t yet tell if red or amber indicators will be employed.
The reverse lamp is nowhere to be seen, though, if we look at previous Bronco rear lighting, it could be just below the main taillight.
As far as how this design fits into the Bronco rear lamp heritage, we can see that a simple, slightly curved-on-the-outer-edge rectangular lamp was the original Bronco design. Later, the lamp was changed to one incorporating a reverse lamp, and was the tall, vaguely shoe-bottom-shaped taillight that was also used on Ford trucks and the Econoline.
Later Broncos from the 1980s used a simple, chamfered rectangular wrap-around corner lamp, with an upper stop/tail/turn red section and a smaller inset reverse lamp.
If there’s a small, square reverse lamp below the upper red rectangular area, then I think the new design would feel enough like a distilled-down, modern take on the traditional Bronco taillight design.
I’d like to see more; I hope Ford is preparing a 50-slide Bronco Taillight Heritage PowerPoint deck as we speak.