Has Fast X given us any new ideas on how to ruin our cars?
This morning, a conversation about The Fast and the Furious series in our writers’ room (a new one dropped on Friday—none of us have seen it) morphed into a chat about car mods. That quickly devolved into comparing the worst ones we’ve seen, which was an excellent prompt for our weekly audience question.
Over the last few years, the most commonly complained-about mods tend to include stanced setups (where wheels are made to poke out from the bottom to achieve extreme wheel fitment), burble tunes (in which a car eats its own farts to sound like a gun), and the “Carolina Squat” (when people make their trucks lifted high in the front and low in the back).
All the above are goofy, sure. Though I have to admit I’m not personally all that annoyed by most wacky mods people choose to do except for one: Slapping cheap LED “bulbs” where halogen headlight bulbs are meant to be.
This is an “upgrade” I see people constantly crowing about on forums and Facebook group threads, and man, do I wish folks would stop. See, when you stick a super-bright LED into a reflector housing designed for a filament bulb, you can get additional brightness—but it comes with a dazzling dose of improper light deflection. In other words: The light gets scattered everywhere and often blinds oncoming traffic. More than annoying, it’s actually pretty dangerous. Cut it out.
I could rant about that for ages, but now it’s your turn to hop behind the bar and grab a top-shelf bottle of haterade. Pour us up a tall glass—what car modding trends need to die?
