One of the best parts about car ownership is the freedom of expression through said ownership. First, you get a car that suits your needs, be it economic transportation from point A to point B, something to enjoy a little luxury on the chaos of the grid or something to hammer down passes at your local speedway. Once you have a car to your liking in your possession, the innate desire to really make it "yours" begins to set in.
Sometimes the glimmer of greatness you build it up to be would have been better left alone, however, and the roadways are clogged with many more bad examples of poorly attempted customs; the ones that cause rubbernecking for the wrong reasons. When your car sports four different finishes from fender to fender or your tailpipes have enough volume to empty a mailbox into – you’ve gone too far, sir.
Sometimes this malarkey coms in the form of backyard modifications that use more duct tape than fasteners; sometimes the work is so professionally done, you feel sorry for all those wasted labor hours down the drain on a car that a not even a crusher would touch. There is no dollar limit, no minimum buy-in, and no excluding criteria that will keep you safe from judgement. If you jump your 20,000lb big rig a hundred feet through the air for show – you’re the guy.
20 Wagon Wheels – On Anything
The good thing about technology is that it advances proportionately without anyone having to worry too much. For example, the wagon wheel was used on primitive carts and carriages. Wagon wheels were good – on wagons. But when we started to move into self-powered forms of transportation, the wheel was adapted itself nicely to the task at hand. Pneumatic tires, precise balancing, lightweight materials, and mass production all greatly enhanced the benefit the modern day wheels provide to cars. So when I see an H3 bone stock with a real-life set of wagon wheels holding it up, I kinda just wanna see the guy’s face.
19 Monster Van
Sure there’s a full frame under that van body – it doesn’t mean you should bolt anything else onto it. Some things are better left alone, and the van is just one of them.
Whether you put the van body on a lifted truck chassis, or bolt on a bunch of truck parts to a van, both equate to throwing money haphazardly into a bottomless abyss that doesn’t even look good as it sucks your life up.
Sure, it’s probably cool to do whatever you van-driving folks like to do back there (with those curtains and stuff), but it’s not enough redemption to justify a huge lift – not now, not never.
18 Monster Van Slam
If going up with a van is bad, some might confuse this with the inference that going down with a van would be better than just leaving it alone in the first place. The average man is far off from doing anything close to this FedEx van as it doesn’t even exist. It’s so custom you’ll never find one like it. A fused a Freightliner COE cab is integrated into a delivery truck box which probably houses a class-8 truck frame. If you’re not going balls-out like this one, you’re probably going to fall short of being worth it trying to slam a van.
17 Rib Jet VW
This 1.6L one-off roadster trans-navigates as may classifications you could possibly select for it. It’s not a ‘62 Volkswagen – but based on a ’62 platform. It’s not a sand rail, not technically a roadster, and it’s definitely not a jet.
It looks like probably loads of fun for about 12.5 minutes before the euphoria of the new experience fades away into the dull-vigor of slamming a 1.6L Volkswagen engine through its four tight gears.
The cool part about it is the inspiration – Curtis Ribelin used his fighter jet for as the idea. The uncool part is that all of that jet-personality infused into the car is largely wasted on you not ever having flown a jet before. It’s just a bunch of weird-looking stuff you can’t appreciate for what it is.
16 Tracks on Flats
The go-all, do-all Subaru line has a reputation has entrenched itself deep within the daily lives of earthy and outdoorsy folks according to Road and Track. They like to plan 300-mile road trips to go look at sedimentary rocks down mild trails that would normally trip up your everyday commuter car; therein lays the value of a Subaru. They occupy the middle ground between where your average daily driver gets stuck and where pickup trucks take over. The full-time all-wheel drive is just enough to keep the car moving over adverse terrain – putting a track conversion on it like it’s somehow ready to withstand a direct hit from an RPG doesn’t make it any tougher but now you can’t drift...or can you???
15 Wings on Cars
“Flying cars might not be science fiction for long,” claims a Business Insider excerpt from a tech post about yet another flying car prototype that’s "gonna be the one." It’s not going to be (obviously).
Half the problem with the flying car is not even the car itself; the biggest inhibitor of the flying car is the very people who’d use them.
Flying cars were introduced in the 1970s and were a disaster according to gizmodo.com. One of the first ones even took out its inventor (shocker). Although we’ve come a long way from bolting wings and a prop on a Pinto, the average human and control over three-axis movement mix like rocket fuel and the Challenger. We’ll have to wait for drones.
14 Lambo Doors
Yep, we’re still on this – and I don’t know why. The fad was big back in the day and at its peak, it was so fresh it was still breathing. If you had Lambo doors, you also for sure had a bangin’ system. If you had a bangin’ system, you for sure pulled up to your homie’s house and left it running while you slid the door up so everyone could watch you bump it as you turned your car off. You were cool for five minutes. Most of you out there that did it lived to regret the doors before you could sell the car. (And you know you still bragged about the doors in the Craigslist ad too.)
13 Boat Conversions
Just like flying and cars don’t mix, the same can be rightfully said about cars and the high seas. Sure, there’s a novelty in having one that can do the other, e.g. a car that can float or a boat that can drive; amphibious abilities range up there in the realm of superpowers as far as cars are concerned.
The problem with the execution of this idea is, as with aviation, the ideas are too purpose-oriented to transition well into an adjacent medium of transportation.
The streamlining required on aircraft and boats is far too extreme to be reasonably integrated into automotive design cleanly in anything that doesn’t look ridiculous and cost $70,000.
12 Morgan Three-Wheeler
This is not so much a car mod as a factory production example of something that has never been a good idea. One cannot deny the awesomeness of this little Vanderhall, and it’s a great novelty car to have. I’d love to own one, but that would mean trading in my four-wheels for an open cockpit and no cargo room. Three-wheeled cars have been obscurely popping up for about as long as cars have been mass-produced and even before but never has the idea become mainstream enough to see one every day. Ironically, it’s more of a rich man's toy than an econo-commuter.
11 The Restomod
The desire to be different drives men to do strange things sometimes, but no amount of strange can explain away the blasphemous thing that this car has become – and most other restomods like it! I’ve never seen a great one, but a hundred ones that tried so hard and were built so well. It’s just that they’re all ugly no matter how dark the room is. This guy’s found a way to destroy everything great about the Corvette. The saddest par, however, is the fabrication work – it’s all excellent. Master-tradesmen talent and such a great starting platform quickly go to waste when people try to out-style a Corvette’s very definition.
10 Bed Dancing
It’s not a Pokémon, (and it’s not what else you thought it was), but it is two childishly colored opponents duking it out with special moves in a turn-based battle system. This circus stunt is a ghetto truck mod from a confused time when people had nothing better to do with their mini trucks – or disposable income.
The hydraulically actuated pistons actuate a compound frame that allows the pickup bed to move independently of the truck in any direction the operator wishes.
This movement can usually be seen gyrating to the beat of some ‘90s gangster rap banging out of the backyard deejay stand in the corner. It has come to commonly be known as bed dancing; tens of thousands into a truck I wouldn’t waste a clay bar on.
9 Muscle Car Donk
Regarding the infamous donk, there are two basic trains of thought regarding them; either they’re extremely ugly wastes of perfectly good muscle cars or they are pretty cool. Some people defend them, in part, because the rest of the world bashes so tirelessly on them. My donk-logic is simple: donks aren’t cool. Some of them look a little bit cool, but the idea of putting the biggest wheels that’ll fit inside the wheel wells of a car is almost dumber than putting a set of 13”, 100-spoke wheels and a set of hydraulics on it. It’s like putting a V-8 in a Prius – or worse…putting a Prius motor-thingy in a Chevelle.
8 Super Stance
Super-stance nation can’t get enough camber, like ever; if they could roll with the wheels scraping flat on the pavement – they’d do it. Each time someone comes out with the newest and latest (fill in the blank) – there’s a target on their back and everybody’s aiming for it.
In all of that excitement, it’s easy to see how proportion gets blown out the window and nobody stops to evaluate the situation until the dust settles.
Once it has, if you find yourself in possession of a set of rims wrapped with strips of rubber thinner than your mouse pad – you’ve gone too far.
7 La Sleeper Ferrari
So, it’s all a cool concept; the rugged outdoors meets blistering road performance in a combination that will fuse two things we love together in holy matrimony until the end of all time. It has to be a hit, right? Wrong! Trying to blend these two things together in this fashion is stupid because nobody wants to go camping in a Ferrari. If they have a Ferrari and do happen to have an itch to hit their local national park, they jump in their 40’ diesel pusher and sail away doing 55mph in the carpool with a Jeep in tow behind the bumper while the Ferrari stays home.
6 Beater Body Kits
Y’all know who you are! There are websites dedicated to you and even races that celebrate the best of the worst. Body kits are very popular and allow a car’s geometric design to be modified for a sportier look. I’ve seen jets with intakes smaller than the massive cavities in the front bumper and the two-inch ride height of the unpainted bow continues no further than the front wheel where a stock rocker panel is probably missing some trim. Sure this race is a highly-celebrated jalopy-worshipping event, but if you’re not doing something worth looking at with your beater Acura, don’t bring attention to it –nobody cares.
5 Jumping Semi Tractors over 100’
Sure deadlines are a real thing and the pressures of a truck driver to deliver his load on time are a constant stressor, but all the dangers truckers have risked for an on-time load don’t even compare... Sure the fans loved it. So would I, but this scares the piss out of me to look at. I would never do this – and neither should you. The sheer fragility of the cab in comparison to the weight behind that projectile you’ve just turned yourself into makes even minute miscalculations deadly. If anything were to go wrong with this stunt, it would take roll bars bigger than they make ‘em to keep you whole.
4 Low-Pro Lift
The body lines of pickup trucks are already fairly carved in contemporary truck design to look higher than they are – but this truck is definitely lifted – a lot too.
This particular owner went big right out of the box and ordered himself some trailing arms to bolt on to the rear axle.
It looks as if this truck can go about anywhere it wanted to – it also looks like he thinks there’s a night club everywhere he’s going. Like everyone would be watching him anyway. Do this if you don’t want to climb rocks and do want to be scared to parallel park.
3 Animalization – For Any Reason
This is not cool in any capacity, small or large. It’s not trendy at all and nothing about it is ok. I understand the business-owner’s narrow margins and the desire to be stand out in a saturated market mumbojumbo – tapping into untouched marketing potential can be a goldmine of revenue. Want to know what I think is wrong with the animal-car thing? How much time you got, buddy? First of all, it’s a lazy, good for nothing trickster; a tail pipe smokin’, wide-nose, front-wheel drive nameplate rip-off. I, in no way, shape or form, participate in any big-butt havin’, barbeque pork-drivin’ nothin’!
2 Trashcan-Sized Exhaust Pipes
The presence of bigger pipes makes you and your car look tougher, and it is a fairly cheap modification. All was well in the universe of progressively-larger exhaust systems until a man sat in his garage one cold, dark winter night, pondering how to ruin a trend by trying to outdo every other car in the universe.
The result ended up being the addition of an exhaust system big enough for a freight train.
I wonder if he considered the possibility that rain water filling those massive funnels would flood his engine before it started pouring out his pipes. Hydro-lock is a real thing.
1 Big Wheels on Muscle Cars
Although Kevin Hart foregoes the wagon-wheel option, he still commits a cardinal sin of muscle car modification – big wheels and tiny sidewalls where none of either belong. The wide stance gave you room enough to stuff the biggest motors in it you could find and the ‘66 GTO was arguably the pinnacle of what Pontiac ever was. This is the last car in the world to even think about putting wheels like this. Just not the direction a muscle car was ever supposed to go. It’s like building an eight-second dragster Civic and then putting four 15” subwoofers in it and another 50lbs of audio equipment.
Sources: musclecarzone.com, dieselshooter.com, autoevolution.com, businessinsider.com, redbull.com, hiconsumption.com.