High cost acces­sories on cheap cars. It makes me laugh.

I saw a Ford F-250 from the late ‘90s with huge diesel stacks attached to it. Mind you, it had a gaso­line engine and it wasn’t being used for mudding. 

The truck owner had to have spent hours phys­i­cally bor­ing out the holes in the truck bed to attach an acces­sory that costs between $300 and $500 on a truck with a blue book value of about $4,000. I have no prob­lem with trucks; I hap­pen to drive one and love it.  

However, there is a prac­ti­cal­ity issue. My truck isn’t worth any more than the F250 listed above. I’m not going to sink a pay­check into an acces­sory that isn’t going to get me any­thing more than unwanted attention.

Furthermore, with vehi­cles like mine that are push­ing their teen years, many other prob­lems crop up such as shocks, struts, dif­fer­en­tials and of course the added cost of using syn­thetic oil for a high-mileage engine.

I can see the fun in adding on to your car or truck. I’ve wanted to do it too. I had a ‘97 Windstar that was pos­si­bly pos­sessed by Satan or some other demonic being. Twice it stranded me.

Regardless, I was dead-set on get­ting a lift-kit for this thing and deck­ing out the inte­rior like Xzibit had paid me a visit. It had over 175,000 miles and would lose oil pres­sure fre­quently. To those not famil­iar with auto mechan­ics, that means it’s going to die. My van had ter­mi­nal can­cer, but I wanted to get it a lift-kit and some throw pillows.

It wasn’t until I unloaded it on the first sucker who gave me $1,200 and went out to find some­thing bet­ter that I finally saw how ter­ri­ble this thing was. It was then, and only then, that I real­ized how silly it was to want such an expen­sive “toy” for my vehi­cle. I have actu­ally been wit­ness to a jacked-up mini van. It was every­thing I thought it could be–absolutely stupid.

I’ve seen worse, though: an early ‘90s Buick with an IndyCar-style spoiler and a Dodge Neon with under­glows, tinted win­dows, rac­ing stripes and spoiler. Neons are clas­si­fied as “four-bangers,” mean­ing they have only four cylin­ders. It wouldn’t even reach a top speed to need a spoiler. Just imag­in­ing that lit­tle Neon try­ing to go around a track made laugh out loud. It made me think of “The Little Engine That Could.”

One of my favorite things to see are $1000 cars with $3000 rims. The wheel wells are rot­ting out from rust and as you look down you notice they’ve invested more money in tires and rims than in Bondo and prob­a­bly engine repair.

There’s noth­ing wrong with lov­ing your car. I love my trucky. There is, how­ever, an egre­gious lack of logic in want­ing it to look pretty over hav­ing it actu­ally function.

Customizing an auto­mo­bile should be done when there’s noth­ing left to do on the vehi­cle in per­ti­nent body work or mechan­i­cal func­tion. I had to learn this, and hope­fully the per­son dri­ving around in that ‘94 Fiesta with spin­ners will learn it too.

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