In today’s consumer-driven world, it is often difficult to stand out from the crowd, especially when it comes to budget cars. Enter the aftermarket world, a place where anyone can quickly take an ordinary car and transform it into a rolling eyesore and the butt of everyone’s jokes.
Spoiler
You aren’t fooling anyone. By placing a cheesy aftermarket spoiler on your front-wheel-drive Honda, you have shown the world that you really have no understanding of how a car works, much less the aerodynamic properties that allow a spoiler to improve the performance of a racecar. Oh, and odds are that in a drag race, you’d still get smoked by grandma in her Prius.
Body Kit
Ah, the body kit. The body kit is perhaps one of the greatest automotive fashion accessories ever to be developed. This success can be measured simultaneously in the countless rolling works of art created by master builders, but also in terms of the number of laughs and snickers from fellow motorists as some Fast and the Furious wannabe blasts by in a Corolla with an unpainted or, better yet, mismatched body kit strapped to its front.
Rims
When your rims and tires are worth more than your entire car, it looks like, let’s face it, you are compensating for something. In addition to the obvious visual catastrophe that is your new ride, I should also point out that large tires and rims actually hamper your car’s performance in terms of handling, acceleration, and mileage. Moral of the story: Don’t install them.
Speaker Systems
If I’m driving down the road and I can both see and hear the rattle of your speakers against their housings as you turn up the bass in your car, I instantly know three things about you: First, you obviously have no knowledge of how to correctly install and insulate a speaker system. Second, you don’t understand a thing about music or the recording industry. Third, you will be partially deaf by age 40.
Solutions
As with most things in life, moderation is usually the best answer. If you want to go for a body kit, get a subtle one and get it painted immediately with a color that matches the rest of your car. With the rear wing, again, if you get one, go subtle or, better yet, leave the car the way it is. Rims and tires should also be understated. Finally, as for the speaker system, upgrade it if you want to, but keep the volume at reasonable levels. Turning up the base to the point where your car starts vibrating doesn’t make you gangster or a baller. It makes you an idiot. I can promise you that all recording artists, regardless of genre, spend millions of dollars to ensure that every instrument in a song comes out at a specific volume level in relation to all the others. By messing with your bass, you are essentially ruining the song they worked hard to create.