Auto trends come and go. Some trends are interesting and may belong only in one time period, while others remain timeless and classic. Then there are the trends stupid people get into.
Usually, you can spot those styling trends because they affect the usability of the vehicle to function for transporting people and items. Sometimes these trends actually make a vehicle unsafe for driving on public roads, which may be perfectly O.K. if the car or truck was built to showcase a concept or thing in a stationary purpose and only driven on public roads via trailer.
15 Puckered Rim On Smallest Obstruction
Here we have a set of useless clown rims on a perfectly good Z-71 package Chevrolet half-ton. If you have ever seen these types of set-up on a pick-up truck, then you may have witnessed that same truck pucker two or more rims riding over a small pothole that any normal car or truck rim would simply rebound from.
These types of wheels and rims aren't useful on a passenger car, and certainly do not belong on a truck. Their usefulness is driving the show-car on and off the trailer to the next car club or car show. Sadly once the money has been wasted for such items, the owner can't return the purchase and regain the tax refund he squandered to purchase them.
14 Too Much Scissor Lift
What we have here is actually the stock wheels and tires on a completely re-engineered Chevrolet Pick-up that has an extremely high hydraulic leveling kit. If you've gone to this level to build a special purpose vehicle, you may as well change the differentials and tire sizes to something that matches the various ride heights you will be selecting. A good start would be 12 ply commercial medium-duty truck tires or hybrid on/off-road super-sized tires.
Obviously, this person has money to burn, but one has to wonder if one of the thousands of low hours military 5 and 10 ton Oshkosh trucks selling for less than $30K might be a better starting point? After all, they come with up to 10 wheel drive and 600 h.p. from the factory. It's up to the builder, but would you rather have something that started as an awesome truck, and build that a little bit rather than take an ordinary pick-up and dump 50k in add-ons to it?
13 Green Girder And Stax
This Ram is beautiful but the over-emphasis of girdling around stock axles is a little much. At this point, we would suggest stepping up to an appropriate set of military Rockwell Axles and blending the whole bottom end a little more. We can't tell from this photo whether the truck looks a little more streamlined when the ride height is adjusted to a lower setting.
The upswept exhaust pointing straight at the rain and cut right through the bed also diminishes the usefulness of the truck. What's kind of humorous about that aspect is that with the extreme lift on the truck, the exhaust has all the room ever needed for clearance had the owner placed it as normal under the bed.
12 Shopping Cart Wheel Burnout
Here is a gentleman pointing out the uselessness of the small tires mounted to a high-powered 8,000 lb. truck. We hope that the owner will change the ring and pinions as well as rims and tires to match the use of the vehicle.
Access to the brake lines and suspension components is excellent, however. If you look at the center section on the differential nearly touches the ground. Burn-outs are easy on the driveline because there is virtually no contact patch when compared to the amount of transmission of power once the vehicle is put into gear.
11 Drywall Lift With Slicks
There are two plausible scenarios for this photo. 1. The very competent professional vehicle builder who successfully built this monstrosity is doing a tire and wheel change and used the race car wheels he had with the same bolt pattern to service the truck while the wheels are being repaired.
2. The other is that "Tony" the owner who makes his living doing drywall or HVAC couldn't get his scissor lift over the rough-hewn entrance to his latest project and once he got his truck close to the building, he swapped on his hobby tires on to the truck so he could fit under the garage door when he retracted the suspension, thus using the truck for both moving the components to the building and then installing them.
10 Winter Overalls
Here we have a good looking modified Ram that has it's winter overalls on to protect both the paint and those expensive rims he runs in summer. The Rust Look Vinyl Wrap looks very appropriate as it's rust-colored and matches the normal wear caused by road salt. This truck obviously has a "functional" leveling kit, but those tiny rims must get overpowered every time the driver touches the gas pedal.
It's hard to tell in the photo, but we think the wheels normally mounted to this truck probably have spacers and a widened stance because it has long wheel studs. We do give the builder/owner props for picking a functional ride height range on his leveling kit. We hope he makes it to the opposite end of the parking lot before spinning out in the snow.
9 Sort Of Big Foot
Here is the Original Big Foot coming off the trailer with normal-sized tires. It's pretty tall even with smaller tires. The change takes place every time they load it on the trailer so it will fit.
Big Foot as a showpiece has been around since the original truck was new and some later versions of Big Foot moved up to giant earthmover and mining dump-truck tires. This is the original model or an exact duplicate. We guess having sponsorship from Firestone doesn't hurt getting all those different tire sizes.
8 Poor Man's Truck/SUV
No dimension in this beast is correct in proportion to other dimensions and from the looks of it, those are 4 ply 14-inch rims from a small compact, possibly a Fiat!
We think Borat's family members may have inhabited it briefly as a summer R.V. over in Kazakhstan! Hats off to the builder for forming the body panels over a tree stump with 1 hammer as the entire tool inventory. Nothing says heavy-duty truck like a McPherson strut assembly for the front suspension! Make use of what you have!
7 Amish Hybrid
Here we have an episode of Whistlyn Diesel that mounted 1-inch wide 19th-century wagon wheels to a 3/4 ton diesel truck. Oddly enough the truck did go forward and backward several hundred miles through a plowed corn-field until the wheels eventually broke into pieces from flexing sideways while turning.
We agree the diameter of the wheels is more than enough but with 1-inch wide wood wide to ride on we didn't figure this set-up would last too long. We do give props for repurposing an obsolete set of wheels.
6 Next Refund Check
This shop is still trying to figure what to fit as far as wheels after the tax refund check covered the lift kit, but there wasn't any balance left on the credit card of the owner after paying the $1000 a month to drive the Denali itself.
Well, at least it's easy to inspect the suspension components and we certainly won't have worry about the tires rubbing. On the upside, finally, someone has an S.U.V. other than an H1 that actually has enough ride height to do true offroading! We think the owner will immediately have to take the truck to the car wash after going 4-wheeling as that is a pretty nice pearl paint job.
5 Chrome Shorty
Nice Chevy with a serious lift kit. It still has the Pavement Princess Tire Size on it. Yes, those are dual-purpose tires but he hasn't upgraded to the differential gear ratio and tire size changes to finish the build. We think the owner will most likely save up the funds and finish the deal.
Props to the owner, other than wheel-well open space bragging, because overall it is a well-finished truck. We do hope there is money left over for the kids' college fund.
4 Till The Field While 4Wheeling
Here we see another episode of Whistling Diesel using very underwhelming homemade steel spiked tires. You can see where they were able to shift into forward and reverse and maneuver on the farm field up to about 5 miles per hour in forward gear. As you can imagine vibration was horrendous and the practicality really isn't there.
Someone might be able to use this set-up to do limited tilling of soft earth, but mostly this is to get ratings as almost all of the trucks on their channel end up being disposed of and written off as a loss of profit for their shop. They admit to making a portion of the lost revenue through payments form YouTube.
3 Burnouts As Easy As 1-2-3
The owner of the 10K Channel was making fun of all the people who do stupid tire and wheel combinations to modified trucks. He was showing the practicality of running no tires and wooden wagon wheels on a 2500 series Duramax powered truck. He drove this around a farm and stopped before doing any damage.
Surprisingly, he made it several yards on both the bare rims and the wooden wagon wheels he fitted with aluminum spacers. If you honestly think a modified roadworthy 6.5 Diesel makes 10,000 horsepower then he's laughing at you as well. That's his point, that people sometimes get silly!
2 Shining Deer From The Living Room
Here we have a Duramax 3/4 Ton Powered Mobile House and Duckblind for an episode of Whistling Diesel. We're not sure what the point is, but the wheels are too small for the wheel wells and surely the siding will need to soon be pressure washed by the local handyman once this thing is put back into its parking space.
Well with over 300 horsepower on tap we think it's plenty fast up to 30 miles per hour at which point the roof and siding start to sheer off from the wind.
1 Look Good While Breaking Those Leaf Springs
Jumping Bean at full lift! This one is just a typical low-rider/hop car that has the lift setting on high. It looks silly, but when the ride height is lowered the wheels would be the right proportion for the car. Nothing is practical about a show car, and like any severely modified truck, this is of limited scope.
The paint job is wild and we doubt whatever top it runs, assuming it has one is watertight. We doubt the owner worries about such things! The paint is an acquired taste but as show cars of this ilk go it isn't bad. We like the contrast with the chrome wheel arch trim which isn't normally found on this truck!