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The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. Cheap aftermarket modifications to your car being sold to people with no knowledge of wh

The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. Cheap aftermarket modifications to your car being sold to people with no knowledge of what they were doing but wanted it too look cool cause they saw it in the movie. Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars that turn them into obnoxious spectacles on the road. I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound.

bch 6y ago
> I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound. Reminds me of the hotrodding chapter of John Muirs[0] venerable How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive [...] for the Compleat Idiot[1] that starts describing the interplay between various systems and how just throwing a hot cam into an engine and calling it a day is a bad idea. Basically - How to hotrod your engine: 1) don’t 2) if you must here’s what you really need to know [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(engineer) [1] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1566913101 https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1566913101
jrockway 6y ago
I think it's great that it's relatively common to work on a complex piece of machinery that you use daily. You get the joys of understanding how a large system works and being able to tweak it according to your desires. It could easily go the other way, where every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it. Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like headlights that blind people or parts that fall off and kill the person behind them. But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.
- encom 6y ago
  >every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it Kind of like how smartphones are right now.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    BMW is doing it right now - some of their US cars will come with features locked behind a subscription model. Want heated seats? They are $99 a year, you get a free 14 day trial to see if you like the feature. Same with adaptive cruise, with more advanced media features etc etc. Their argument is that vast majority of new BMWs in US are leased, so it's "better" for customers to lease a basic model for less, and then pay extra for features you want. The obvious question here is - if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.
    - huffmsa 6y ago
      Because they're physical features already installed, it'll probably be okay. Will void your warranty, but nothing the MFG can do. Same way retuning your ECU to make more power works. Versus something like hacking a subscription for satellite radio, where the feature in question is the content the service is providing, which is easier to frame as illegal. Then there's the case of hacking hour Tesla to enable autopilot. The hardware is there (like the seats) but the functionality is continually updated via subscription. I look forward to the lawsuits, with the hope that the consumer prevails.
    - rocqua 6y ago
      > if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on. If you try and hack through the DRM on the controller, they might try and get you for copyright infringement on the software on the controller. But if you just write your own controller, things might be different.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- dunce2020 6y ago
  > But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create. Then get a guitar or a paint brush.
browningstreet 6y ago
I guess I'm really old. Before Fast and Furious, I lived through the slammed mini truck / monster car stereo (speakers, speakers, speakers) craze of the late 80s. And before that there were many, many trends, like muscle cars, etc. It's always been like this...
- beenBoutIT 6y ago
  The Fast and Furious franchise is, not unlike the late 2pac, a reflection of the community. A percentage of America has always been modding their cars and an even larger percentage enjoys dreaming about modding cars - the films draw from that, not the other way around.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices. It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.
    - eckza 6y ago
      Please, continue to tell us how much smarter you are than everyone else. People love it when you do that!
    - ooobit2 6y ago
      It'd be nice if someone would do something about Wrongthink Trolls. It's not cool to see several downvotes on a random post, three or four levels deep in a comment chain, simply because it criticizes people spending money on useless political spin. It's crazy, maybe even hate speech to suggest a math textbook should be more important than a political memoir? ...on Hacker? Is there some sudden influx of people who join forums like these so they can tell themselves they're intelligent without walking that self-talk? Quickly finding ourselves in a world that serves to do nothing more than recite problems instead of give actionable steps and vetted research toward solving them. A world where saying something nice to someone if you're not the right color or gender can be violent; where violence toward someone because of their color or gender is something nice. It's a broken record, but how Orwellian for me, at 34, to sit here and not be able to suggest I don't condone bullying, and for the self-proclaimed egalitarian activist to stand up and say, "You don't deserve to be heard here! You don't even deserve to be here!" I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks.
jdietrich 6y ago
The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. I'm pretty sure that the worst thing to happen to America was the genocide of the native population, but I get your point.
mkhpalm 6y ago
The really cheap and blatantly illegal headlight craze took off with Amazon and Ebay. Brick and mortars like Autozone have to abide by some standards.
- madengr 6y ago
  30 years ago, I put fog lights on my car where they were not supposed to be. Also had a homemade radar jammer. 90 years ago my grandfather would route a gas line and spark plug into the exhaust to make flames. Illegal mods have anyways been popular.
ironmagma 6y ago
This is much more down to improper enforcement. If having illegal headlights meant losing your license, people would think twice about it.
- raducu 6y ago
  This so much! It al boils down to how much money police can get out of fines and how many licenses they can suspend, AND how easy they can do that. If they lack measuring equipment, the fine is too low, police won't bother enforcing a law.
mschuster91 6y ago
> but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound In Germany, headlight aim is checked at the 2-yea mandatory inspection, dito for exhaust stuff. Is that not a part of US checks?
- 0x138d5 6y ago
  Most states do not have the equivalent to TÜV or MOT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
- flyinghamster 6y ago
  The joke is that in the US, vehicle registration is handled by the states, and while some states have strict inspection requirements, many states have none whatsoever, or only check emissions. You can still get ticketed for unsafe equipment, though.
- bluGill 6y ago
  I've never had my car checked when I did registration. Other states have done it. For a while the next city over did some emissions testing, but it was well known that it was hard to fail and they eventually got rid of it. Rumor is the company making the equipment made out well...
- sgt 6y ago
  Here in South Africa, inspection happens when you buy a vehicle. After that, it's not inspected again unless you sell it to someone else who will have to take it to roadworthy inspection. The test is pretty good and covers everything from suspension to oil leaks. It does however not cover emissions, as far as I know.
- astura 6y ago
  Depends on what state you live in. In my state there's absolutely no routine inspections whatsoever on automobiles, where I grew up there was yearly comprehensive safety inspections required - that being said, you only get a ticket if you fail to get an already registered car inspected.
growlist 6y ago
Here in the UK Top Gear has a lot to answer for in promoting an utterly moronic car culture (and I like cars).
- switch007 6y ago
  How so?
  - wastedhours 6y ago
    The almost wholesale shift of obnoxious drivers moving from BMW M cars across to Audi's RS line after Top Gear started mocking the former and talking up the latter was a fast, pronounced change. Apart from that, not sure. Top Gear was always pretty good when it came to car culture, it's just a lot of surface level "car fans" just follow their word and end up being the face of the trend.
  - growlist 6y ago
    Where I live we have countless boy racers with farty exhausts obnoxiously informing everyone at all hours of their amazingly unique and original ideas about how to modify cars. I pin the blame in no small part on Top Gear for spreading a dumbed down car culture to the masses. That's not to say I didn't enjoy watching it. I just don't enjoy what it contributed to bringing about.
    - throwaway5792 6y ago
      That's nothing to do with TG. They've been doing that for decades. Top Gear's mods were stupid, and no teenager uses it as the motivation for modding their car. If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.
anjc 6y ago
> Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars Untrained people fiddling with their cars didn't start with The Fast and the Furious! If anything, this era marked the beginning of the end of all that.
cujo 6y ago
The worse thing that happened to driving was we were convinced it should be fun. Sharing public space with big, heavy, dangerous boxes of metal should never have been been spun as fun.
- shoes_for_thee 6y ago
  And yet, it continues to be fun.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Pep Boys was a thing for like 20yr before the first Fast and Furious movie came out.
wastedhours 6y ago
In the UK we were doing Jap-style and had Max Power long before F&F. Fast and the Furious might be responsible for widening the pool of people though. Although in my experience, the modding scene didn't actually massively increase in size from what I saw. The old timers "aged out" and into better, stock cars, and the young kids coming in could actually only do less with the available cars (modding anything reasonably recent is a frustrating and expensive task, and so were limited to things like headlights and exhausts). When I wanted to put a small new lip spoiler on my car I got an insurance quote for 4x because of it. Suffice to say I left it stock.
woah 6y ago
Wasn’t there a whole 1950’s musical about this?

bch 6y ago

> I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound. Reminds me of the hotrodding chapter of John Muirs[0] venerable How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive [...] for the Compleat Idiot[1] that starts describing the interplay between various systems and how just throwing a hot cam into an engine and calling it a day is a bad idea. Basically - How to hotrod your engine: 1) don’t 2) if you must here’s what you really need to know [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(engineer) [1] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1566913101 https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1566913101

jrockway 6y ago

I think it's great that it's relatively common to work on a complex piece of machinery that you use daily. You get the joys of understanding how a large system works and being able to tweak it according to your desires. It could easily go the other way, where every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it. Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like headlights that blind people or parts that fall off and kill the person behind them. But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.

encom 6y ago
>every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it Kind of like how smartphones are right now.
- gambiting 6y ago
  BMW is doing it right now - some of their US cars will come with features locked behind a subscription model. Want heated seats? They are $99 a year, you get a free 14 day trial to see if you like the feature. Same with adaptive cruise, with more advanced media features etc etc. Their argument is that vast majority of new BMWs in US are leased, so it's "better" for customers to lease a basic model for less, and then pay extra for features you want. The obvious question here is - if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.
  - huffmsa 6y ago
    Because they're physical features already installed, it'll probably be okay. Will void your warranty, but nothing the MFG can do. Same way retuning your ECU to make more power works. Versus something like hacking a subscription for satellite radio, where the feature in question is the content the service is providing, which is easier to frame as illegal. Then there's the case of hacking hour Tesla to enable autopilot. The hardware is there (like the seats) but the functionality is continually updated via subscription. I look forward to the lawsuits, with the hope that the consumer prevails.
  - rocqua 6y ago
    > if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on. If you try and hack through the DRM on the controller, they might try and get you for copyright infringement on the software on the controller. But if you just write your own controller, things might be different.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
dunce2020 6y ago
> But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create. Then get a guitar or a paint brush.

browningstreet 6y ago

I guess I'm really old. Before Fast and Furious, I lived through the slammed mini truck / monster car stereo (speakers, speakers, speakers) craze of the late 80s. And before that there were many, many trends, like muscle cars, etc. It's always been like this...

beenBoutIT 6y ago
The Fast and Furious franchise is, not unlike the late 2pac, a reflection of the community. A percentage of America has always been modding their cars and an even larger percentage enjoys dreaming about modding cars - the films draw from that, not the other way around.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices. It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.
  - eckza 6y ago
    Please, continue to tell us how much smarter you are than everyone else. People love it when you do that!
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    It'd be nice if someone would do something about Wrongthink Trolls. It's not cool to see several downvotes on a random post, three or four levels deep in a comment chain, simply because it criticizes people spending money on useless political spin. It's crazy, maybe even hate speech to suggest a math textbook should be more important than a political memoir? ...on Hacker? Is there some sudden influx of people who join forums like these so they can tell themselves they're intelligent without walking that self-talk? Quickly finding ourselves in a world that serves to do nothing more than recite problems instead of give actionable steps and vetted research toward solving them. A world where saying something nice to someone if you're not the right color or gender can be violent; where violence toward someone because of their color or gender is something nice. It's a broken record, but how Orwellian for me, at 34, to sit here and not be able to suggest I don't condone bullying, and for the self-proclaimed egalitarian activist to stand up and say, "You don't deserve to be heard here! You don't even deserve to be here!" I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks.

jdietrich 6y ago

The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. I'm pretty sure that the worst thing to happen to America was the genocide of the native population, but I get your point.

mkhpalm 6y ago

The really cheap and blatantly illegal headlight craze took off with Amazon and Ebay. Brick and mortars like Autozone have to abide by some standards.

madengr 6y ago
30 years ago, I put fog lights on my car where they were not supposed to be. Also had a homemade radar jammer. 90 years ago my grandfather would route a gas line and spark plug into the exhaust to make flames. Illegal mods have anyways been popular.

ironmagma 6y ago

This is much more down to improper enforcement. If having illegal headlights meant losing your license, people would think twice about it.

raducu 6y ago
This so much! It al boils down to how much money police can get out of fines and how many licenses they can suspend, AND how easy they can do that. If they lack measuring equipment, the fine is too low, police won't bother enforcing a law.

mschuster91 6y ago

> but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound In Germany, headlight aim is checked at the 2-yea mandatory inspection, dito for exhaust stuff. Is that not a part of US checks?

0x138d5 6y ago
Most states do not have the equivalent to TÜV or MOT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
flyinghamster 6y ago
The joke is that in the US, vehicle registration is handled by the states, and while some states have strict inspection requirements, many states have none whatsoever, or only check emissions. You can still get ticketed for unsafe equipment, though.
bluGill 6y ago
I've never had my car checked when I did registration. Other states have done it. For a while the next city over did some emissions testing, but it was well known that it was hard to fail and they eventually got rid of it. Rumor is the company making the equipment made out well...
sgt 6y ago
Here in South Africa, inspection happens when you buy a vehicle. After that, it's not inspected again unless you sell it to someone else who will have to take it to roadworthy inspection. The test is pretty good and covers everything from suspension to oil leaks. It does however not cover emissions, as far as I know.
astura 6y ago
Depends on what state you live in. In my state there's absolutely no routine inspections whatsoever on automobiles, where I grew up there was yearly comprehensive safety inspections required - that being said, you only get a ticket if you fail to get an already registered car inspected.

growlist 6y ago

Here in the UK Top Gear has a lot to answer for in promoting an utterly moronic car culture (and I like cars).

switch007 6y ago
How so?
- wastedhours 6y ago
  The almost wholesale shift of obnoxious drivers moving from BMW M cars across to Audi's RS line after Top Gear started mocking the former and talking up the latter was a fast, pronounced change. Apart from that, not sure. Top Gear was always pretty good when it came to car culture, it's just a lot of surface level "car fans" just follow their word and end up being the face of the trend.
- growlist 6y ago
  Where I live we have countless boy racers with farty exhausts obnoxiously informing everyone at all hours of their amazingly unique and original ideas about how to modify cars. I pin the blame in no small part on Top Gear for spreading a dumbed down car culture to the masses. That's not to say I didn't enjoy watching it. I just don't enjoy what it contributed to bringing about.
  - throwaway5792 6y ago
    That's nothing to do with TG. They've been doing that for decades. Top Gear's mods were stupid, and no teenager uses it as the motivation for modding their car. If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.

anjc 6y ago

> Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars Untrained people fiddling with their cars didn't start with The Fast and the Furious! If anything, this era marked the beginning of the end of all that.

cujo 6y ago

The worse thing that happened to driving was we were convinced it should be fun. Sharing public space with big, heavy, dangerous boxes of metal should never have been been spun as fun.

shoes_for_thee 6y ago
And yet, it continues to be fun.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

Pep Boys was a thing for like 20yr before the first Fast and Furious movie came out.

wastedhours 6y ago

In the UK we were doing Jap-style and had Max Power long before F&F. Fast and the Furious might be responsible for widening the pool of people though. Although in my experience, the modding scene didn't actually massively increase in size from what I saw. The old timers "aged out" and into better, stock cars, and the young kids coming in could actually only do less with the available cars (modding anything reasonably recent is a frustrating and expensive task, and so were limited to things like headlights and exhausts). When I wanted to put a small new lip spoiler on my car I got an insurance quote for 4x because of it. Suffice to say I left it stock.

woah 6y ago

Wasn’t there a whole 1950’s musical about this?