Why do people ruin cars?

Scottah the reason why this happens to cars is that it performs a very valuable service to society:

If you're looking for a particular car and they are all have plasti-dip finish, poorly attached body kits and hack wiring jobs this is your warning. "At this time in history this model is currently a D-bag Poster Car" this is you're first and only warning as a non D-Bag to move to a different model.

When I look on CL and see Cafe Racers that are nothing more than some old Honda CL350 with the fenders removed and clubman bars I question it the same way I questioned people who liked Disco (I was weened on Punk) but as Alfadriver basically says to each their own. I have owned numerous disposable cars, buy them cheap use them up. A couple of them are now collectable, of course I'd never modify them cause that would cost money and we barely had money for gas.

Tom

DeadSkunk wrote: In reply to wheels777: Have you posted pictures of your yellow coupe on a vintage Beetle forum to see what kind of responses appear?

No...I received hate mail from the Air-Cooled forum when the black bug was posted there and I joined to comment on it. I can only imagine the hate mail on the Yellow car.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my buddy and asked him "why do I keep ruining cars?".

It seems I buy a cheap car, make the suspension horribly stiff, make the engine horribly loud, make the interior horribly absent, and then get sick of driving it and repeat.

Remember, we all learn by making mistakes, and we likely all have cars and mods (and maintenance schedules) that we would have done differently after we learned not to do it 'wrong'. The real question is, will you find a way to get a good deal on a sweet car from someone else's expensive mistake, or will you complain about them exercising their freedom?

In reply to Robbie:

I feel your pain.

After grenading three turbocharged cars, I've stopped buying them. "Just a little more" is way too easy and it gets away from you.

logdog wrote: I have de-hooptied a few Hondas in my time. Its not too hard. Once I swapped an ugly body kit for stock parts with a kid who wanted to put the body kit on his stock Civic. The circle continued.

yeah I found it somewhat easy to derice the first integra my brother had slowly finding the needed stock parts cheap on craigslist and facebook. Got it to the point it was basically stock. Good thing most of the "mods" were bolt ons.

Seems within a type of car you got the same specific craptastic mods across the range, hondas with cheap coilover sleeves on stock suspension and crappy exhausts, vw's with notched frames, mustang owners with blacked out tail lights and headlights, to name a few.

NickD wrote: Ya know, I've often wondered this. The car that seems to predominantly get ruined is Cobalt SSs. Seems like every one of those I have ever seen has mismatched tires on every corner, rust and/or dents on every panel, a trashed interior and every light on the dash on. I think a lot of it has to do with kids who have the money to get them but not the money or responsibility to properly modify them or take care of them.

I actually ran up against a Red Cobalt SS this past Friday in my S60R. It was in mint condition with mods. We did a little dance and she was running right. All mods seemed to improve the car tremendously (no huge exterior mods done). I was thoroughly impressed because all SSs are usually a shell of what the once were. When I saw his car, in that condition, I thought "Unicorn, we got to have a little fun." She'd kick my butt on off-the-line acceleration but couldn't handle the R on the top end. (30-whatever) lol

Questionable mods I can understand, as everyone has their own preference. An aggressively set-up autocross car can be a penalty box on the street--- does that ruin a car any more or less than a "stanced" out VW or Civic? I dunno.....to each his own.

What I don't get are folks that have a nice car, but keep it filthy. Nasty brake dust on the front wheels, garbage filling the interior, etc. It always amazes me how many nice cars I see that have interiors that could be featured in "Hoarding-- Buried Alive". I'd like to think that these are just cars purchased for spoiled kids who don't appreciate them. Unfortunately, I think it's beyond that---- some folks just like to wallow in filth. Surprisingly, women seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to this. Their homes may be clean and tidy, but they treat their cars like a landfill. Never could quite understand that.

In reply to Joe Gearin:

This x100!

I take much more offence to filthy nasty cars than I do E36 M3 mods.

Joe Gearin wrote: Questionable mods I can understand, as everyone has their own preference. An aggressively set-up autocross car can be a penalty box on the street--- does that ruin a car any more or less than a "stanced" out VW or Civic? I dunno.....to each his own. What I don't get are folks that have a nice car, but keep it filthy. Nasty brake dust on the front wheels, garbage filling the interior, etc. It always amazes me how many nice cars I see that have interiors that could be featured in "Hoarding-- Buried Alive". I'd like to think that these are just cars purchased for spoiled kids who don't appreciate them. Unfortunately, I think it's beyond that---- some folks just like to wallow in filth. Surprisingly, women seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to this. Their homes may be clean and tidy, but they treat their cars like a landfill. Never could quite understand that.

As a technician I see this a lot. It floors me how somebody can take a $40-$60K car and treat it like a trash can. Inch thick filth on the dash, (semi) empty drink containers laying around, nasty/sticky child seats, dog hair, and don't get me started on smoker's cars...

How about a 2-3 year old Toyota with the smashed driver's window taped over with polyethylene? For 6+ months?! I mean, come on. That would be what, $300 to get fixed even if you're paying out of pocket? This was an ex-coworker's car, and I know she was making enough to save $300 unless she had a heroin habit I didn't know about.

The Hoff wrote:

Joe Gearin wrote: Questionable mods I can understand, as everyone has their own preference. An aggressively set-up autocross car can be a penalty box on the street--- does that ruin a car any more or less than a "stanced" out VW or Civic? I dunno.....to each his own. What I don't get are folks that have a nice car, but keep it filthy. Nasty brake dust on the front wheels, garbage filling the interior, etc. It always amazes me how many nice cars I see that have interiors that could be featured in "Hoarding-- Buried Alive". I'd like to think that these are just cars purchased for spoiled kids who don't appreciate them. Unfortunately, I think it's beyond that---- some folks just like to wallow in filth. Surprisingly, women seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to this. Their homes may be clean and tidy, but they treat their cars like a landfill. Never could quite understand that.

As a technician I see this a lot. It floors me how somebody can take a $40-$60K car and treat it like a trash can. Inch thick filth on the dash, (semi) empty drink containers laying around, nasty/sticky child seats, dog hair, and don't get me started on smoker's cars...

I think that a lot of people don't care about their car, so it gets nasty, or, people have too much stuff in their car (and stuff in general) so it gets messy.

I think that it's somewhat regional. In Northern California I see fewer cars subjected to wanton customization than I have in a while. I think that's partially because our economy's pretty strong right now, and the mod-crew have jobs and need reliable, presentable cars, not ones with body kits falling off them.

There's a difference between modifying a car and "ruining" a car in the way the original post detailed. On one hand, if it's your car, do whatever you want to it! It's yours, and it's there to make you happy. On the other hand, most of the "tuner" cars (WRX, Evo, MS3, etc.) are on their 3rd or 4th owner before the Monster decals and cheap flea market mods get festooned to the poor thing.

When it comes to these cars, especially the turbocharged ones, it's just so easy to make them go a little bit faster than originally intended for next to nothing. Hell, with my first WRX, I dove down that rabbit hole, tuning it with random "known working" maps uploaded by people I've never talked to on a forum I didn't even belong to via a Tactrix cable and my laptop. That's like finding a random box of pizza on a picnic table in a park. Sure, it's a possibly delicious pizza, and it's free, but what's it going to do to you later? Do you have the stones to find out? I did, and it didn't blow the motor into shiny chunks. Others weren't so lucky.

I also learned what to do by following people on forums. Some guy tackled poorly shifting WRX transmissions by making a "cocktail" of random fluids. I did this because other people said it worked. It kinda did, I guess, but I'm sure a good fluid would have done the same thing. I had the STI scoop, the full catless exhaust, the random stranger Stage II tune, the not-so-great Prosport gauges in the ATI clock pod, the grounding kit, all of the Kartboy stuff... it was like a rolling NASIOC forums science project. I loved it at the time.

Now, I sort of knew what I was doing, and I knew what I was getting into and it wasn't my first rodeo. I did a lot of research before diving into some of the mods, but imagine you are a kid today seeing how easy things look, and it's your first car. That 2002 WRX I paid $16k for in 2005 is now $4-5k and has been through the ringer already. You want to make it "cool", so it gets all the crap your 17 year old brain thinks is cool. We were all lame at 17, and you know it!

It makes me sad to see these cars in dilapidated shape more because it makes me feel old than anything else.

Scottah wrote: I don't understand. Every. Single. WRX, SRT-4, Focus SVT, Civic, or other enthusiast vehicle on Craigslist is ruined. Black spray painted wheels, tinted tail lights, cheap coil overs, CELs for stupid simple fixes, Monster Energy drink cans in interiors that are trashed and probably smell like a butt hole and an ash tray. Why? Why do all these cars get ruined the same way? Do they have d-bag meetings and decide how to "modify" their cars the same way?

You need to look at the other side of the coin. All these ruined cars are pointing at what is going to be collectible in the near future.

The people who are destroying the cars are doing you a favour by both making these car more unique and providing restoration fodder by keeping the cars on the road in whatever condition they can afford. In ten years, these low-life car wreckers will have made some $$$$ and got all nostalgic for the E36 M3box they drove in HS and go looking for said car.

Good examples are always to be found if you look long and hard enough. I still come across MGBs that have not been mucked with too bad and Miata are much the same.

SilverFleet wrote: You want to make it "cool", so it gets all the crap your 17 year old brain thinks is cool. We were all lame at 17, and you know it!

Well said! That pretty much made my day.