Comment by jerlam

5 hours ago

Many of the mods make the car worse in everyday environments, outside of a pristine track.

After I got into my friend's modded-out car, we had to slow to walking speeds to exit the parking lot because it would bottom out on the curb cut. The same happens with speed bumps. Large rims get damaged on potholes that a normal tire and rim combo would just shrug off.

Add a few years to your life and you don't want to crawl and duck into a low car anymore. Stiff suspensions are hard on the back and joints.

18 comments

jerlam

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criddell  3 hours ago

But it's fun to mod the car and you get to drive around in an art project. My dad did basically the same thing during the 1950's and 60's hot rod culture. This is more or less what his car looked like:

https://www.hotrod.com/features/1932-ford-roadster-the-golde...

He never had a lot of money to spend on it but he did have access to car parts and was a gifted mechanic. One of my favorite memories was going out for a ride in that thing in the summer with him and I would ask him to go faster and he would wind it up to about 120 mph for a few miles and it was so exciting (and, in retrospect, a bad idea). He would tell me he had to do that occasionally to get the carbon out. :)

  • panative  3 hours ago

    The author here didn’t even recount doing any work on his car or demonstrate any real knowledge of basic mechanics. Just talks about the high-end shops that did the work.

    He did a great job painting himself as completely self-absorbed and lacking in personality that he’s making up with consooming. Down to the whining and performative identitarian victimization. Like if you just enjoy cars and love your Vietnamese-American hyphen culture awesome do that. But this whole article reeks of LOOK AT ME.

Esophagus4  4 hours ago

Similar with lifted trucks.

Lifts are bad for driveshafts, suspension, tires, etc

  • thegrim33  2 hours ago

    Well there's right ways to do them, where you replace all the weak components with properly strengthened components, and geometry fixing components, and then there's the wrong way to do them, which is what 99% of people do, where they just do a cheap lift, without upgrading the other components, and eventually it fails.

    Probably the primary reason why vehicles like Jeeps get a bad reputation - they're incredibly commonly modded, and incredibly horribly/improperly modded, and the vehicle gets the blame when the mods fail, rather than the horrible things the owner did to them.

    • nradov  2 hours ago

      Average quality and reliability ratings even on new, unmodified Jeeps are abysmal. I understand why some consumers like them for style and off-road capability but overall it's a trash brand.

missinglugnut  1 hour ago

I mean mods are always about tradeoffs. You're generally not smarter than the team of engineers that designed it, but you probably do have different goals, that's where the opportunity to improve an aspect of the car comes in.

I think it should be done with a clear understanding of what you're giving up, but some people don't want to put practicality first and that's okay.

weinzierl  4 hours ago

Fashion that makes things impractical is often quite sticky.

When the first people drove mountain bikes in the city I thought it was fad that would quickly go away but here we are. Ok, they were an improvement over the previous fad of racing bikes, but neither of them is as practical in the city as they could be.

  • wbl  3 hours ago

    The potholes in the city of Berkeley make me glad I have a hybrid bike.

thewebguyd  3 hours ago

I see this all the time where I live. People doing their grocery shopping in their super stanced out civic, having to find a route around the speed bumps because they literally can't go over them without high centering.

Yeah, it looks sick. But it's completely impractical for daily driving, and quite frankly you are putting both yourself and others at risk the moment you blow a tire going 80 on the freeway and lose control of your car.