Here’s where everyone gets to tattle on their high school car friends. Or, maybe you were the high school car friend whose Civic had stacked wheel spacers. Whatever’s the case, we all know that modifying a car can get in the way of what its engineers worked toward, especially from a safety perspective. No one at Honda ever planned for an EG hatch to go 150 miles per hour in the quarter-mile, after all.
That leads to our question of the day—what’s the most dangerous modified car fail you’ve seen?
Earlier in the week, we ran a post on this massively lifted Ford F-450 and its busted 30-inch wheel. The dealer ended up dropping it on the polished aluminum wheel face, and everyone’s lucky that incident happened in a parking lot and not on the road. That’s not to say a tuner car or truck has never broken spectacularly on the highway, though.
Whether it’s shoddy workmanship or ignored maintenance, the going can get hairy when you add more speed or, in that truck’s case, more weight. Car people—not excluding myself—don’t always consider the side effects of modifications and more often than anyone will want you to know, it results in trouble. That’s why it’s important to always carry a fire extinguisher in your ride, especially if your buddy’s uncle wired the Kicker sound system himself.
Let me know your story in the comments—if you’ve got pictures, even better. I’ll be hanging around for a while and inviting my friends to tell their tales. If names need to be changed to protect the innocent (or guilty), that’s fine, too.
Rather email about it? Contact the author directly: caleb@thedrive.com