10 Times Supercars Borrowed Parts From Cheap Cars

These days, most supercars spend years in development, with millions spent on refining every little detail to ensure they’re worthy of their six-figure price tags. It wasn’t always the way, though. In days gone by, there were lots of have-a-go heroes and companies working to much tighter budgets to bring pointy exotica to the roads.

Often, that meant pilfering bits from cheaper, mass-market cars to avoid going to the cost and effort of developing something themselves. Here are 10 examples of exotic cars borrowing bits from far more mundane metal.

Lamborghini Diablo – Nissan 300ZX headlights

Let’s start with one plenty of people will be familiar with. When the Lamborghini Diablo received a major facelift in 1999, it ditched the original’s ultra-cool pop-ups for a pair of fixed headlights.

It’s no secret that these were taken from the Z32 Nissan 300ZX – not exactly a mass-market hatchback, but magnitudes cheaper and more commonplace than the ultra-exotic Diablo. A small carbon fibre strip was included at the top of each headlight to hide the Nissan logo stamped into the lens.

Lamborghini Murcielago – Ford Focus indicators

By the time the Diablo’s successor, the Murcielago, appeared in 2001, Lamborghini had been in the cash-flush bosom of the VW Group for three years, so you’d assume most of the parts-borrowing of the company’s tumultuous 1990s period would have been ironed out.

You’d be mostly right – while most of the Murcielago’s bits were bespoke to it, one small part – or rather two – came from the first-generation Ford Focus: the side indicators. The distinctive triangular lenses were angled a bit for installation on the Lambo, but it must be reassuring if you own a Murci to know that if one of the indicators gets damaged, you can get a replacement for all of a fiver online.

Pagani Zonda – Rover 45 climate control unit

When the Pagani Zonda appeared in 1999, it was unlike anything the world had ever seen make production – a retrofuturist steampunk mashup of a Group C racer and something from The Jetsons. That was true of the interior, too, where even the climate control panel, with its subtly curving row of buttons and rounded display, looked a bit swishy for the late ’90s.

That swishiness, though, came courtesy of the Rover 45, of all things. Its buttons and screen were transplanted straight from its often wood veneer-covered dash into the Zonda’s festival of quilted leather, polished aluminium and exposed carbon fibre.

Lotus Esprit – Fiat X1/9, Rover SD1 and Toyota AE86 rear lights

The Lotus Esprit lasted a heck of a long time in production, the same basic underpinnings sticking around from 1976 until 2004, and evolving from a fairly attainable 160bhp four-pot sports car to a twin-turbo V8 supercar that gave the Ferrari 355 and Porsche 911 Turbo something to think about.

It wouldn’t be a Lotus without some compromise, though, and this came with the Esprit’s rear lights for much of its life. On the Series 1 car, they came from the little Fiat X1/9, then changed to the Rover SD1’s units on the Series 2 and 3. Peter Stevens’ major ‘X180’ facelift in 1988 saw them change again to the rear lights from the AE86 Toyota Corolla Levin, and it was only the very last update in 2002 that brought in something (slightly) more exotic, with the Esprit gaining the circular rear lights from the original Elise.

MG XPower SV – Fiat lights

Ah, the MG XPower SV, a bizarre supercar fever dream from the cash-strapped dying days of MG Rover that somehow managed to escape the sketchpad of Peter Stevens (yes, him again) and make production. It’s little wonder that this car borrowed bits from far cheaper models, but perhaps more surprising that some of them weren’t taken from lesser MG and Rover models.

No, the XPower’s lights, both front and rear, came by way of Italy. The headlights were from the second-generation Fiat Punto, and the taillights were from only a slightly more exotic source – the Fiat Coupe. Of course, this isn’t the car’s only Italian connection – its Modena-built chassis came from the equally mad Qvale Mangusta.

McLaren F1 – Cobo rear lights

Yeah, this is another one that won’t come as a huge surprise to many people, but it’s always worth being reminded that even a car as exotic and ambitious as the McLaren F1 (styled, incidentally, by Peter Stevens) borrowed some parts from unexpected places.

Let’s clear one thing up, though: the F1’s tail lights technically weren’t taken from a Bova Futura coach; they just happened to be the same off-the-shelf units from Italian supplier Cobo that the big bus used. In fact, the very same lights were also used on early Lamborghini Diablos.

Bova image: Kev22, CC BY-SA 4.0

Invicta S1 – VW Passat rear lights

We’ll forgive you if you forgot about – or haven’t even heard of – the Invicta S1. This big, TVR-ish coupe, which briefly revived a British marque of the 1920s and ’30s, was produced in tiny numbers between 2004 and 2012, and if you Google its name these days, you get results about a watch before the car.

Almost inevitably, then, some parts bins were rummaged through to make it happen. This was most notable in the rear lights, which came from the facelifted B5 VW Passat. Invicta’s cunning plan to disguise this? Turn them both 90 degrees, and swap them left to right and vice versa.

Invicta image: Brian Snelson, CC BY 2.0

Ferrari Testarossa – Austin Montego mirror adjuster

The Austin Montego definitely never appeared in Miami Vice, and we can’t imagine many eight-year-olds had a poster of one on their bedroom walls in the ’80s, but it does have one thing in common with the Ferrari Testarossa: the switch for adjusting the door mirrors.

This little rotary switch was first introduced on the Montego in 1984 and found its way onto various other British Leyland and later Land Rover and MG Rover cars, but also onto the Testarossa as well as several Maseratis of the era. Oh, and somewhat unsurprisingly, it's quite hard to find usable pictures of a very specific, tiny interior part of both a Testarossa and a Montego, so you'll just have to trust us on this one.

Maserati MC20 – Fiat 500e door releases

Most of the cars on this list have hailed from a bygone era when it was far more commonplace for this sort of parts sharing to go on. It’s not completely fallen out of favour, though.

High-end Maserati is a bit of an outlier among Stellantis’ sprawling web of brands, but that doesn’t mean it can’t raid its fellow manufacturers’ parts catalogues here and there. That’s why, to swing open the butterfly doors on your £225,000 Maserati MC20, you press the essentially the same funny little electronic release button as one would to exit a Fiat 500e that costs almost exactly £200k less. Admittedly, the one in the above image is from the GranTurismo, but it's the same in all of Maser's current range.

Absolutely everything – Citroen CX door mirrors

For decades, door and wing mirrors were purely functional items, with styling a secondary concern. One of the first cars to break with that trend was the facelifted Citroen CX, which introduced mirrors that don’t look all that special today but were very shiny and new for the time.

The low-volume car-making industry embraced these humble parts with open arms. The list of cars that use them is staggering: the Jaguar XJ220, Aston Martin DB7, Vantage and Virage; Lotus Esprit and Excel, Renault Sport Spider, Venturi Atlantique, TVR Chimera, Griffith, S3 and S4; a fleet of Marcoses, the AC Ace and the mega-weird Mega Track all owe their door mirrors to a big, weird French saloon.