I was looking at aftermarket parts for my car online, out of curiosity. I was rather apalled at the pointlessness of most of the upgrades, as well as the cost for adding them.
For $80, I can get a metallic strip put on the area between the front and rear door on both sides. Now this strip is little more than a strip of aluminum backed by adhesive. You know, I could probably get some metallic tape, and get nearly the exact same effect .
But I think the most outrageous upgrade was for ‘binocular’ lights. They seemed okay, except they cost $750!!! for friggin headlights! And, it didn’t give any information about their performance; no candlepower, or how much area they can illuminate- they look like the car’s stock headlights except they are black. If it was demonstrated they were 300% better than the stock headlights, then yeah it might be worth it to spring that much money for them if you were buying the car new. But they don’t advertise that! Which leads me to believe that they aren’t particularly better.
Well, all the places I’ve seen selling them don’t even try to BS you into thinking it improves performance, they all go on about how it gives your car an ‘aesthetically improved, sporty appearance’.
Those light-shade things. The plastic velcroed on things. Made of dark plastic, therefore making your brake and headlights impossible to see. How are those legal? They’re ugly too, imo.
Heh, you wouldn’t think so if you bought an early Audi TT. These cars had a high speed stability problem and Audi was forced to recall them and install a rear spoiler.
That being said, the vast majority are purely cosmetic, and worse than useless.
I’d have to say that although they’re cheap and realtively harmless, lighted windshield washer jets strike me as absurdly idiotic and pointless. Or maybe the underhood speaker that makes a whoosing noise so people will think you have a turbocharger in your car, that’s pretty lame…
A ‘me too’ on the spoiler thing – I’ve never understood that. It looks ridiculous to have this huge spoiler sitting three feet above your trunk.
That, and groundglow. What the heck is the point of lights underneath your car? I could see it if maybe you installed bugzappers under there or something. You’re rolling down the street thumpin’ to some good bass and zapbzzzzztzap…
Maybe this isn’t what you’re looking for, but a couple of streets away from where I live, there’s a car decked out with “POWERED BY MUGEN <insert Japanese characters here>” stickers.
Only one problem. It’s a 1988 Opel Kadett. For which Mugen obviously never made an engine. I’ll see if I can snap a pic of it someday, it’s quite a sight.
How about the “fuel saver” magnets that you strap onto your fuel line, or Slick 50. These don’t work, the FTC has sued to get them to retract their claims and people still buy them.
A teacher of mine at mechanics school used to get the J.C. Whitney catalog just to cut out the ads for the dumber products and post them on his bulletin board. Yep, that bulletin board could make your “car run like a cop after a speeding hot-rodder!”
Oh, what about those people who’ll hang a CD from their rear view mirror, because they’re convinced it will deflect the radar beams coming out of the speed cameras, rendering their car “invisible”? I see a ton of those every day around here. Idiots!
And another one: those stickers you can put on the lid covering your fuel cap, the ones that make the lid look like an F1-fuel fitting. Yeah, I’m sure that’ll speed up that 1986 Civic. :rolleyes:
I assume you’re talking about those wire-cage sort of things often found over the lights on SUVs (usually to accessorize with the incredibly useful brush guard over the front grille :rolleyes: )?
I always assumed they were there so that when they bump their bigass Explorer or Expedition against my car in the parking lot (which happens disturbingly often), it won’t break their taillight lenses, only mine (which they care nothing about, apparently, due to the lack of notes left every time someone backs onto the top of my hood and front fender :mad: ).
There is an army of cars like these around here. I’ve seen a Saturn SL1 four door sedan with the number 3 on the drivers door (It’s actually about two feet high), ground effects, g.e. lighting, along with about 200 racing stickers and a three foot wing–which looks like it’s beginning to wiggle loose.
Well, in some respects all after-market parts are pointless unless you track your car, in which case a select few have a dramatic effect (unfotunately, most of them, aside from wheels, you can’t see, so they don’t make you “look” cooler) … having said that, my favorite pointless aftermarket group of parts have to be body kits. This includes spoilers, which have already been mentioned, fenders with extra vents, bumper covers that look like they belong on a NASA project, carbon fiber hoods, “altezza” lights - you name it. These parts aren’t cheap either, yet I see a disturbing number of small, cheap cars sporting them. Out of curiosity I looked at how much it costs to turn, say a civic, into one of these monsters - you end up at around $2-3k on the low end, and that’s not including paint matching. That has to be close to the market value for some of the cars I see. But hey, it’s not my money…
Unfortunately, I can’t remember what model of car it was (some compact import POS), but I saw some jackass that had modified his windshield wipers to a single-wiper design, like you’ll occasionally see on some off-road racers. The exeptionally stupid part of it was that the wiper was so long relative to the windshield dimensons that it could wipe less then 2/3 of the surface, and had to stick out in the middle of the windshield when it was off.
The Tornado tube, that is a fine piece of well crap that you can add to your intake to “swirl” the intake charge. Oh the poor suckers that buy those miracle horsepower for $50.00 gimmicks.