[masraum]

Originally Posted by shadowjack1

First off let me say, "To each is own".

Street take overs. Burning up engines, tires and running over each other. This seems like a rather stupid event, but hundreds of people show up and get involved.

Wire wheels that stick out 2 feet from the tire. What the Fu&k. Any purpose in this look?

Hydraulics in cars. I see these guys "jump" their cars and in some cases destroy the undercarriage. But other then that what purpose. Just looks??? Seems a waste of money. Does it increase the value of the car?

Thousands of people engage in the above behavior, so I must be the one off kilter.

A lot of the fads that you talk about are completely based on aesthetics, and what took over was the desire to one-up the next guy by being more extreme.

The poke and stance crowd with their cars that have ridiculous negative camber so that they are practically running tires on the sidewalls or have in some cases inches of wheel sticking out past the tire bead on the outside. "I can be more extreme than you" and the most extreme "wins." That's the same with the trucks doing the Carolina squat, the "swangas" (silly wire wheels) in Texas/Houston, the kids with the crap stuck all over the outside of their cars (because they can't afford anything else).

Just look at the Japanese car scene where the cars look like something out of an anime cartoon. It's all about being the most extreme, most out-there.

I think some of this stuff may have started as a way to mimic some performance cars, but over time morphed into something that's more aesthetic than performance oriented. It's really not that much different than the guys that obsessively clean their cars in an effort to have the cleanest car (concours).

I think most of us on this site have aesthetics that we like, but we also like and probably prefer performance over looks, so we're far less likely to mod a car in a way that will adversely affect the performance of the car.

I also think that most folks want to be liked, and want to belong and the easiest way for a lot of folks to do that is to mimic the folks around them. So even if what everyone else is doing is silly, lots of folks will do silly stuff just to belong to that group.