by Luis Prada

It’s entirely unfounded by science, but a person’s car is reflective of their personality. If you own a Lamborghini there’s a good chance you speed by Occupy protesters with no hands on the wheel because your left is busy throwing fetid dog poop and your right thrusts its middle finger upright proudly.

Simply purchasing a car is kind of like reading the one-sentence description of a movie that is your personality on the on-screen menu as you flip through the channels. By adding things to the car–various accessories, decals, and trinkets–you’re fleshing out your bio into a lengthy, highly detailed Wikipedia entry. It’s a bio no one has to read; everyone can intuit every sentence of your Wikipedia page with a single glance as you drive by.

Whistle Tips

“Everyone, LISTEN! My penis is HUGE!”

Whistle Tips, or as I like to call them “Jerk Alert Systems,” are small metal plates with a hole in the center that can be welded into the inside of a car’s exhaust pipe. When the car accelerates, the pressurized air moving through the exhaust passes through the hole in the plate, causing a high pitched whistle that sounds like a train slamming on the emergency breaks before it obliterates a bus full of school kids. The thing is, the screeching train will eventually stop, either because of the breaks or the bus-load of freshly obliterated children, who were also deaf and blind, just to make the mental image more depressing. Whistle Tips never stop. As long as the car is moving, the whistle is screaming out and can be heard from up to one mile away.

When you outfit your ride with a whistle tip, you are also, probably unknowingly, outfitting your car with an imaginary crosshair that everyone you drive by places into their own vision as they becoming fully erect while fantasizing about mounting a rocket launcher to their front porch  and killing you and every one of your car’s occupants–like what must have surely been playing in the heads of Oakland residents throughout the most famous whistle-clip journalism of all time.

Bubb Rubb: whistle tip legend

It goes without saying, but there’s no need for a whistle tip. The only logical reason to get some whistle tips is if your life is entirely devoid of love and, most of all, attention. If you wander through life aimlessly, like an unexorcised ghoul in the desert, and you’re looking for someone, anyone, to toss a glance your way to give your pathetic life a delicious, hunger satiating morsel of meaning, go ahead and install some whistle tips! In no time everyone you pass will fire off stares of contempt in your direction. Stares so intense and hateful they feel like the simultaneous mass extinction of an entire race of people all boiled down to a single look on an angry dude’s face. It may not be the love and attention you so crave, but you’re a frivolous idiot, and such mortal needs are beyond your desire.

Truck Nuts

Like this, but they look exactly like a scrotum and hang from your truck

It takes a special kind of person to take a step back and examine their lives and try to figure out exactly what’s missing that can make them feel complete. It takes a special, aka mentally underdeveloped, kind of person to do the same thing and their answer, ultimately, is “I need testicles on my car.”

The truck nut is one of the most offensive things you can do to any piece of equipment you own. On this vehicle that you take out in public, where there are women and children and priests and just generally nice people that don’t want the saggy portions of the male anatomy shoved in their faces, you place a set of realistic testicles that sway to and fro with the movement of your car, eerily reminiscent of any time a man has dropped trou in public and pelvic thrusted like the music was a-thumpin’ and no one was a-watchin’. Can you imagine the audacity, the metaphorical balls it takes to display testicles on your car, completely ignoring the fact that people don’t want to see that? That’s borderline sociopathic behavior.

Probably more than any other reason, what makes truck nuts so frustrating for the average non-truck nut-using driver is it’s hard to tell if the person with the truck nuts on their car is doing it to be funny or if they are actually proud of the fact that their car looks like it barreled through a dildo emporium and the balls portion of an anatomically correct pink rubber tallywacker got stuck to their hitch. We never stop next to theses mental defectives at a traffic light, kindly request they roll down their windows as if to ask for directions, and then ask them if the rubber testes hanging from their truck is there because they’re making some oblique comment on the state of American humor and its obsession with immaturity, or if they like to pretend their vroom-vroom is a pee-pee.

Bullet Hole Stickers

Grow a pair of truck nuts and shoot for the real thing

When I think about cars littered with bullet holes, I think of The Goonies; particularly, the scene at the dilapidated restaurant when Chunk opens the large doors of what looks like a barn and says, “ORV…bullet holes…BULLET HOLES!?!?” and then runs to warn the rest of the Goonies that the car he saw at the beginning of the movie, the one being chased and shot at by cops, is the same one that’s parked in this creepy abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere. You mention bullet holes, my brain immediately goes to that part of the movie.

The next thought is about the owners of the ORV from Goonies, the Fratellis — the crime family on the run from the law. They’re a bunch of bad people with a presumably massive rap sheet and could care less about who they hurt as long as they get what they want. They’re ruthless criminals and the perfect villains for the Goonie gang.

With that said, if you’re putting stickers of bullet holes on the trunk of the ’98 Corolla you use to skid your sorry ass to and from community college, and the worst crime you’ve ever committed was using Kazaa to illegally download some REO Speedwagon tracks back in 2002, you’re emasculating your car by adding a thick, Disneyfied layer of fakeness. It’s like strapping on a plastic Guitar Hero axe, slapping on some of the “totally rockin’ ” stickers it comes packed with and calling yourself Eddie Van Halen. Its reeks of the kind of desperation you’d only see in middle school from the kid that always tried too hard to be cool and crammed the word dude in the sentences as comfortably as a wrecking ball in a porta-potty.

Neons

That said, if you literally become neon, stick with it, Steampunk Tron

Without the advent of lights on cars, the evolution of the automobile would have seen a ton of cash poured into the development of cow tippers instead of front bumpers and you would have seen U.S. military-style funding into high-powered windshield wipers that could clear off all the human and animal viscera that we’d accumulate on our drives to the corner market.

So you need the lights on the front of the car, because that’s where the things that need to be seen can be found. And someone at some point in the span of human history got drunk, looked at a neon Budweiser sign in a bar and thought “I need that under my car”, and then immediately passed out on the napkin he scribbled that idea on.

Even from an aesthetic point of view it’s tough to argue for neons. It can be argued that in all of car history neons were a good aesthetic choice only once, and that was when the flux capacitor in Doc Brown’s DeLorean was activated. In other words, the only time neons made any sense on a car was in a work of fiction, and only while traveling through time.

Lowering The Suspension

It’s called a suspension for a reason, guy

You know your car modification is an inherent failure when speed bumps become your nemesis. That’s exactly what lowering your car’s suspension does; it turns every speed bump and pot hole into a hair raising adventure. If you’re ever in a car with lowered suspension that’s nearing a speed bump, it feels like being a member of the crew as the Titanic closed in on the iceberg. You know something bad is about to happen and you’re just hoping there aren’t too many deaths.

Watching a dropped car get its undercarriage stuck on a speed bump is like watching a fat kid have trouble hopping over a fence. The belly gets stuck and there’s all sorts of frantic movements that do nothing to help the situation. Turtles have an easier time flipping themselves over when they’re on their backs. It’s a sad and pathetic display. The car was dropped for the purposes of looking cool, and now the owner’s need to be perceived as cool becomes the undoing of any coolness they thought they had gained. It’s so sweet.

Effect #1: It makes your partner look like a Kristen Stewart doppelganger

Luis Prada’s work can be found on Cracked, FunnyCrave, The Smoking Jacket, and GuySpeed. If you visit his Tumblr page, The Devil Wears Me, he will give you a non-refundable virtual hug.

Luis is fast becoming our resident psychologist since he previously analyzed Five Bizarre Effects Sex Has on The Brain. –>