They say every man is created equal, that everybody is entitled to a fair share of liberties and that nobody is less than another. While we’re not about to touch philosophy with a 10-foot pole, we’re gonna tell you right now, whoever said that never saw a donk!

We as humans may be created on a level playing field, but we as car owners are definitely not! The rent-a-wheel concept has ruined cars forever, and “E-Z” financing is helping bring about a world of car culture that glorifies an unbecoming concept: the bankroll special.

Cars are an extension of our true selves, and it’s a beautiful thing to be able to modify them to our liking. The principle, however, is taken a step too far sometimes, and we’re here to draw a few lines in the sand.

Where is the proverbial “line?” The thing is, it’s not really a line, and it’s hard to describe but you know it when you see it. When you see a $1,000 pickup truck with over $12,000 worth of wheel bolted to the hubs – there is your line. When a house full of offspring don’t get to go to college because someone had to slam a set of 34s on their Camaro – there is your line.

It’s a free country, and anyone can do what they like with their cars without judgment. When those ambiguous lines are crossed though, you better believe judgment day is here.

20 Audi Tron R8

via Fourtitude

This poor R8 was given the Bieber treatment to make it look like a high-performance mirror (which is a crime against the sports car on account of both Bieber and the mirror), but West Coast Customs didn’t just stop there! In fact, they were just getting started with the styling atrocities.

Normally, a set of clear rims would be something of a spectacle on any ordinary car, but the R8 is no ordinary car. It doesn’t want to show you what its rotors look like under the illumination of color shifting LEDs, it wants to show you what they can do until they burn glowing orange, but these rims would probably melt under the torture.

19 Forgiato Fame

via Car ID

Forgiatos are sick, and anyone in the know knows. The name itself doesn’t make a wheel though. Ford has a GT that will mash on just about any you could ever hope to own, but that doesn’t make the Fiesta any more desirable. Whether you like Forgiatos (or Rolls-Royces) is secondary to what happens when the two come together under a chrome-clad wrap that looks bright enough to protect the Apollo 11 Command Module from reentry into the atmosphere.

Some people like to show their money off on the road, and that’s ok. But there is a finite boundary of acceptability; at a certain point, bling just becomes tacky no matter what rims you’re rolling on.

18 Forgiato Fury

via Pinterest

This guy just needs to be looked at; there’s no other explanation for the sight we see before us. The only difference between this dude and the Rolls-Royce Ghost is the price point. While this pickup could be had for under $1,000 all day long, the Ghost runs well into the six-figures – you could have hundreds of pickup trucks for the price of one! Maybe this guy is on a budget…but then again, maybe not.

The 30” 3-piece satin Forgiatos run over $12,000 without tires! While having rims that cost more than the car they’re mounted on makes no sense, having rims that cost enough to fill your entire front yard with pickup trucks is just outlandish – when they’re on that pickup truck!

17 Show Ponieous Maximus

via Innov8 Design Labs

Half of us wants to fall on our knees and bow down to this visual gold mine (no pun intended) of shiny contrasting angles and finishes, the other half wants to rip the poor truck body off the tacky three-link monstrosity and beat the suspension components with their own panhard bar.

The Bro-Maxx F-100 is definitely a looker, but what do you do with something like this after it wins a SEMA award or two? You look at it and wish you had your $100,000 back! It’s not a torque daddy; you can’t tow boats with it, nor can you drive down a rocky trial. All you can do is look cool while you wave goodbye to your friends as they hit the trails.

16 Budget Baller (LOL!!!)

via Hiveminer

Some people need to update their smartphone to receive presidential updates in a timely manner. “Dubs” went out of style a year after they blew up, and nobody ever got the memo. In fact, after all the cool kids got done abusing excessive masses of rotating metal in their wheel wells, the style seemed to proliferate into the poverty-stricken populous.

You know this owner is broke when he can’t afford to replace the center caps on his 22s – and you know something's wrong when he still lets you know how big they are by blasting the quarter panel with 10-inches of cockeyed signage! Still, these guys love it when you ask how big their wheels are.

15 Bonus Round!

via Every Stock Photo

You’ve successfully reached the bonus round! Your challenge is to look at this “Gucci” Regal and pick out as many things wrong with it as you can. Once you’ve found them all, continue reading to see how many you got! Ready, set, go!

1.) It’s lifted. 2.) It’s Donked. 3.) It has blue halogens. 4.) It has super-bright blue halogens that blast you in the eyes at night because he didn’t adjust them properly. 5.) It’s painted with Gucci logos. 6.) It has a Gucci license plate. 7.) The Gucci license plate isn’t even straight. 6.) It’s not in a junkyard. 7.) It IS a junkyard. 8.) Junkyards don’t even want it. 9.) The rims don’t even want it!

14 Glow-Rider

via Pinterest

For all that a Scion may or may not have ever been, the BRZ was a great car. It’s essentially an FRS, or a Toyota 86. Whatever way you want to look at it (and the Scion brand as a whole), it’s a very well loved little car.

Being a joint venture between Toyota and Subaru, it was able to live on even after Scion shut their flimsy doors in 2013. But as great as the 86 is, luminescent rims don’t do anything but call cops' attention from a mile away (as if slamming your 86 wasn’t enough of a cop-caller).

13 Pimp My Pacer

via Pinterest

Pimp My Ride was a lousy show in every respect possible. The work was shabby, the concepts were crappy, the cars were dumpy, and none of them had any business touching a car. It glorified the worst kind of customization, and made you think this was cool! First of all, there’s a reason nobody today has ever heard of AMC; secondly, not even Wayne’s World would approve of this!

The car was already in bad shape to start with, but after Xzibit’s cronies got done “pimping” it out, it was arguably MORE embarrassing; they could have at least tinted the windows to hide the driver! We respect people that drive beaters – not pimpilicious beaters!

12 Platinum Player

via Hip Hop Cars

There’s a culture shift happening in the world, and it’s almost as tragic as child hunger! Ok, so maybe it's not even close to the tragedy of child hunger, but it’s heart-wrenching for muscle fans to see the fenders and quarters cut up on a Camaro for something like this! If you’ve ever wondered how to destroy a Camaro with a single upgrade – wonder no more.

This car will never see a normal set of rims (or respectable acceleration) again, and the need for validation has never burned so brightly in the history of car culture. It almost makes you want to steal the car and leave the rims on blocks!

11 Rocket Man

via Hiveminer

What makes the Honda Civic so legendary? Is it the fuel economy? Is it the sleek body lines? Maybe it’s the unparalleled reliability? Nahh…We like the Civic because you can throw three buddies on the trunk, pull the parking brake up through the roof and mash through five gears while you smoke the living daylights out of a set of discount tires until they’re throwing sparks everywhere!

The Civic is too legendary though for its own good! For all the hype, you’d expect it to be a bit faster. The factory 0-60mph times are just a tenth of a second faster than a Geo Prism GSi (in 1990). The 6th-gen Civics are a tad faster, but people don’t forget.

10 Chill, Bro

via Specialty Ford

Rims themselves aren’t the bad guy here, but they get a bad rap for destroying cars of all shapes and styles. The cars themselves aren’t necessarily bad either, but when the combination comes together to look something like this, it’s all bad!

This F-250 started out in life eager to work and was ready to prove its three-quarter-ton worth to the world. All was good until someone decided to give it enough negative offset to build campfire on the tire! With low-profile tires proliferating on lifted pickup trucks, we’re just waiting to see the day when knobbies start to get popular on Acuras. “Stance-bro” is coming!

9 Party Foul!

via Car Throttle

Somebody needs to call this thing out! Not because the AE86 is a jalopy, we actually love the little Corolla for all that it is…but we know what it is. Unlike the delusional drifter fanboys that see the thing sliding around in their dreams all night, we don’t want to build a shrine for it.

It’s a fun drifter, and almost thrilling to bang through all five of the T-50’s ratios – but come on guys! It’s from the ‘80s, has 120hp, tops out at 124mph, and is literally as slow as any respectable four-door sedan you can buy today. We can slide our Mazda6 around a hairpin too, you know – and we have dual climate control! Take that to the bank.

8 Hallucinating Hummers

via Solar Conflict

The deep dish Specialty Forged C701s kick the rubber out on this H1 by a number on inches, but is that something you really want? Some off-roaders would attest to a wider track being beneficial, but not with super-dubs! The Hummer is packed with features that make it a good all-terrain vehicle, but it sucks as a street truck.

Inboard brakes, a channeled driveline, portal gears, and CTIS make the wilderness its playground, but frolicking around an urban jungle is a waste of a Hummer – unless you’re Tupac! But even Tupac kept a decent set of off-road wheels on his Hummer.

7 LS On The DL

via Stance Nation

The LS400 is a legend for more reasons than people realize. Back in the day, Japan wanted to compete with the big luxury producers in a U.S. market, but they weren’t typically known for their luxury cars – yet! So what did they do? They spent $400 million developing an all-new, aluminum, DOHC V-8. The 1UZFE, designed for the big bad 400, could smoke the “rear” tires for days and days without getting tired; the car quickly became a legend.

Although the VIP has its rightful place in today’s car culture, it’s still sad to see this one dragging its body kit everywhere it goes, when it really wants to be drifting everywhere it goes.

6 S13 Rotary

via Stance Nation

This car is one that you either love or hate – with a scrupulous passion. The Soviet chassis slammer didn’t start out life anything like the car you see today, but one man’s vision would lead the car down a journey of self-discovery that eventually found an odd combination of stripped and strapped. The interior carpet has been removed; the floor smoothed and painted.

The right-hand driver is beefed up with a Custco rollbar, although it’s hard to imagine it ever overturning. A modified 13B PP Mazda rotary somehow found its way inside the engine bay, along with an RX-8 six-speed transmission. The SR20 is long gone, which has the tendency to anger some folks.

5 RTW? Huh?

via Mashable

Most people wonder what the acronym stands for when they hear it, and most are let down when they realize it’s about as unoriginal as it can get. They call this contraption the Reconfigurable Wheel Track, and it’s exactly what the name implies. At first, it sounds like a stupid idea (and it very well may be). The whole idea though is to change the shape of the wheel to optimize it for a variety of different terrain.

The wheel goes from round to triangle, in about two seconds, and can shift on the fly. It’s literally a reinvention of the wheel and is supposed to revolutionize vehicle transport. (We’re not so sure…)

4 Downhill Slope

via Mashable

Longevity is important for some car owners, like those who buy Toyotas. Other times, style takes precedence over reliability. Although the E36 was named Car and Driver’s “10 Best” numerous consecutive times during its decade production run, the downhill slope for the car would come quickly, and it would not be kind to the car.

This one has a few over-the-counter upgrades, like the halogens that “must” remain on for every photo shoot, but a careful inspection of the front end will reveal that the car is actually struggling to hold itself together. Even the license plate thinks it’s a joke! Can’t argue with that one! The rims are probably the best feature on the entire car.

3 Scion XB-Trippin’

via News Scion XB

Scion was doomed from the start, and their lackadaisical marketing would eventually catch up to them. The discontinued marque of Toyota hit California dealerships in 2003 and was aimed at younger buyers. They were incredibly cheap, and you rarely ever found a first-generation XB without tape holding the deck lid handle on – if it even had the deck lid handle still!

They ran the brand for 13 years before realizing that even poor college kids weren’t that dumb (plus, they were poor); even starving students wanted quality. Some people still try to throw some spiffy five-spokes on their whips, but everybody already knows it takes more than some Dubs to save this jalopy.

2 BBS Nation

via Trade Websites

It almost looks legit; despite the tacky window deflectors, somebody actually put some money into this thing! Roof racks, a mini aero kit, a mini slam! This XB is doing everything it possibly can to fit in with the cool kids.

The cool kids don’t even dig it though – not when it can’t even crook out the camber right! $2,000-worth of BBS Super RS rims are the prominent feature on the car (and by far, the most expensive), but the things are too small to even fit the spoke detail properly! Over half of the car’s resale value is spent on upgrades that don’t increase the value very much (not without a deck lid handle)!

1 This Guy

via Lecombd

We don’t even have a clever title for this one…there’s just too much here to soak in. For one, single cab, short bed Rams are only good for two things and this guy does neither. If he didn’t go cheap on the truck though, there would be no way to afford his smoke stack!

The ram is just confused; lowrider up front, donk in the back, bed-mounted stack; even we don't know what it’s trying to be! Everything is super-heavy duty aside from the one thing that should be – the trailer hitch! We’re surprised he even splurged on the tow package! (Every Cummins with a Titanic stack needs a hitch of some sort, though).

Sources: Tuner Shop, Noxton, Top Speed, West Coast Customs, CNet, The Drive, Car Throttle.