Have you ever travelled on the road somewhere and spotted a car that doesn’t look as though it was produced by the car’s manufacturer that way from the factory? If so, you probably came across what is known as a “modified car”.
In a nutshell, these are cars that have been modified from the car’s original specification for the purposes of improving its aesthetics or increase the engine’s performance. For some people, they modify a car for a specific purpose, such as for track day events around racing circuits such as the Nurburgring in Germany.
But for most modders, they simply do it because they want to stand out from the crowd. The problem is, the latter reason is a completely pointless waste of time and money, and as a person that did just that in his younger days, I can explain to you why!
Some modifications look stupid
I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of examples in the past where people have modified their cars, and they look really tacky and stupid. There seems to be a rise in the number of people going for the “Euro” look, as per the mk1 Volkswagen Golf pictured above.
This includes having ridiculously wide and small alloy wheels with stretched tyres on them, lowered so much that any extra weight in the car will undoubtedly cause the tyres to scrape on the arches and fail any government-mandated car tests, such as the annual MOT test for cars that are more than three years old in the United Kingdom.
Companies that sell tuning products such as aftermarket exhaust systems, air filters and so forth market their products as being able to increase an engine’s power. But the sad truth is that these “performance” modifications in many cases cause your car to have less power than it started off with!
That’s because the owners of these cars do not have their car’s ECU remapped. This is the electronic brains of the car, and contains a set of manufacturer-set operating conditions ‘mapped’ to a chip that ensures the car runs at its best under different conditions using the parts the car was built with (like the original exhaust and induction system).
They add no value to a car
The people (typically teenagers) that modify their cars have to waste their time taking their modifications off their cars, because they know full well that these mods don’t add any value to the car and so will have to go to the trouble of selling them off separately.
It would be better to simply buy a car with a decent engine in the first place, such as from car supermarket www.carbase.co.uk.
They have a negative impact on car insurance
The majority of car insurance firms will refuse to insure a car that has been modified from the manufacturer’s standard specification, because it increases the risk of it being the victim of theft or being involved in an accident.
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