This morning I saw a car with Spy Hunter wheels - seriously, the center of the wheels bulged out about 6" and looked as if it could do pretty gnarly damage to another vehicle.
I thought about all of the situations where you might be close to other cars - parking, etc. - and this struck me as possibly the stupidest car modification I’ve seen to date.
The previous frontrunner was the dangling balls idiots put on their pickup trucks (or Kia sedans - I saw that one, once). But there’s no real potential for damaging anyone else’s car in that, is there?
So what car mods do you find dumb? I imagine we’re going to see ridiculously loud stereos, oversized skinny wheels, and loud mufflers.
That is annoying, but it’s not so much an idiotic mod as it is something that the owner needs to adjust. Now, those alarms that say “Please step away from the car?” That’s idiotic.
I haven’t heard one of those since the early 90s, so maybe nobody makes them (or buys them) anymore.
I don’t know about you, but I used to hear car alarms constantly about 15 years ago. Now, I hear them rarely - there seem to be a lot less false alarms, and they don’t seem to be so loud and annoying anymore.
When they lower suspensions to the point they can’t keep up with the normal flow of traffic lest they scrape the body/fenders on the pavement. Bonus points if they did that to a pickup, thus negating their ability to, you know, carry anything.
Whistle Tips, that make the car exhaust sound like a train whistle. Make sure to watch to the end, where the genius defending them almost crashes into another car and runs a stop sign.
The one I always encountered said “Protected by Viper. Stand back.”. Or then there were the car alarms so sensitive that they’d be set off by another car alarm, so you’d get a chain reaction.
I think, though, that car alarms didn’t ever actually get any better: We all just got so used to ignoring them that they became useless, so nobody bothers any more.
That’s what I was going to say - yeah, get a vehicle with good clearance, then take away one of the design features of that vehicle for no good reason.
Also, those exhaust modifiers that make your car sound like a lawn mower. Ooh, I’m shivering with awe at the power!
Here’s a pretty good collection of idiot car modifications http://www.youdrivewhat.com/ At the moment the first few pix are mostly decorations (desecrations?). Page back a couple pages for some better examples of idiot mods.
Aw, man, it’s too bad laughatrice.com went belly up, they had an awesome collection of ridiculous mods. Looks like the British version is still alive, though, at Barryboys.co.uk.
I used to walk past a little Honda that had an improvised spoiler affixed to it, made with sheet metal and 2" pipe, and painted black. It was large enough, high enough and at a ridiculous enough angle that its stupidity was compounded by the fact that it would have largely obscured the view out the back window. Rad!
I saw a car once that had “Bad News” painted on it, The rest of the car had newspaper headings shellacked all over… real newspaper headlines. Plus I don’t think shellac makes finishing for car exterior.
I always get a laugh from the cars with huge rims and skinny tires. Who in hell thinks that look cool? The other big laugh (as also mentioned above) is the shitbox with a giant spoiler on the back (which I refer to as a carrying handle) and a resonator underneath.
