CUSTOMIZED MOTORS CARS

Modified cars can be significantly different from their stock counterparts. A common factor among owners/modifiers is to emulate the visual and/or performance characteristics of established styles and design principles. These similarities may be unintentional. Some of the many different styles and visual influences to car modification are:

• Art car: Cars painted or decorated to be art pieces.

• Cal look: A modified classic Volkswagen intended to evoke California through bright colours, trim, and accessories.

• Drag car: Cars modified for drag racing

• Drift car: Cars modified for drifting.

• Dub or donk or Hi-Riser: Characterized by huge wheels with low-profile tires, often with upgraded speaker setups, and sometimes custom paint, interiors, and engine upgrades.

• Euro style: Stanced with one-off paint and small wheels, with shaved features to define car body lines.

• German look: A Volkswagen Type 1, Type 3, or Karmann Ghia lowered and fitted with late model Porsche mag wheels and touring car-influenced styling. Heavily modified suspension and drivetrain with emphasis on handling and cornering.

• Hot rod: Style primarily consisting of period-specific vehicles, components, and finishes to reproduce characteristics of early drag cars from the 1930s and 1940s.

• Import or JDM: tuned Japanese vehicles.

• Itasha: cars decorated with images of characters from anime, manga, or video games

• Kaido Racer: Japanese style of cars typically with lowered suspension, bright paint jobs, extreme body kits, and extended exhausts, sometimes inspired by Japanese Group 5 "Super Silhouette" racecars. Commonly associated with the Bōsōzoku.

• Kustom: Style primarily consisting of American cars built from the 1930s to 1960s customized in the styles of that period.

• Lowrider: Hydraulic or airbag suspension setups, custom paint, pinstriping, custom interior, and, typically, small diameter wire wheels. Others may look like straight restorations, aside from a low stance.

• Military/service style: Cars designed to look like certain service vehicles.

• Off-roader: Cars, SUVs, and trucks modified for off-roading, such as overlanding, rock crawling, or desert racing.

• Outlaw: Typically Porsches 356, 911 and Karmann Ghias modified with more powerful engines, brakes, and a more aggressive appearance. This movement took place in Southern California in the 1960s.

• Race car: Cars built to compete in auto racing.

• Rally car: Cars built to compete in rallies.

• Rat rod: A style of hot rod and custom cars, imitating the "unfinished" appearance of some hot rods in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. "Rat style" also defines a car kept on the road despite visible heavy wear.

• Restomod: Classic cars that combine original exterior styling with modern applied technologies (such as new suspension, wheels, transmission) or modern interior features (multimedia, etc.) for comfortable everyday use.

• Siren kings: A New Zealand Pasifika subculture where cars or bicycles are modified with loudspeakers or public address systems for use in competitive battles.

• South London look: Subtly modified 1950s-1970s British Fords that are lowered, with pastel paint and 13-inch Lotus Cortina steel wheels or RS, Minilite, or Revolution mag wheels. These cars often use a tuned Ford Kent or Pinto engine.

• Slab: Originated in the Houston area in the mid-1980s—usually, a full-size American luxury car fitted with custom "elbows", a type of extended wire wheels which protrude out from the fenders, loudspeaker setups, and neon signage inside the trunk panel. Other "slab" modifications include hydraulic-actuated trunk panels (a "pop trunk"), candy paint, vertical stainless steel trim on the trunk panel (known as "belt buckles"), aftermarket grille, and the use of a Cadillac front-end sheet metal conversion. The interiors of slabs are usually clad in beige or tan (in what is called a "peanut butter interior"). Usually associated with Houston hip hop music.

• Sleeper: Stock-looking cars with performance upgrades.

• Stanced: This style is mainly associated with sports and passenger cars with lowered suspension setups. Custom wheels with low-profile tires play a prominent role in this style and often feature aggressive sizes, offsets, and camber.

• VIP style: A Japanese style of customizing luxury cars.

Features

The Reactor (show rod) by Gene Winfield with paint fade style blending from one color to another

Paint

Custom paint jobs play an essential role in the culture around customized cars. Builders will often use special painting techniques to produce unique finishes, including the use of candy paint, metalflake, and color shifting paint. Additionally, builders will often create paint jobs with intricate designs or patterns by pinstriping, painting by hand, airbrushing, taping out patterns on the car and painting inside them, painting over lace, overlaying gold leaf, and more. Some customizers will also opt for vinyl wraps, vinyl decals, or plastidip in place of a traditional paint job. In addition to paint, individual parts of a car may also be chromed, gold plated, or engraved.

Transparent but wildly colored candy-apple paint, applied atop a metallic undercoat, and metalflake paint, with aluminum glitter within candy-apple paint, appeared in the 1960s. These took many coats to produce a brilliant effect – which tended to flake off in hot climates. This process and style of paint job were invented by Joe Bailon, a customizer from Northern California.

Painting has become such a part of the custom car scene that in many custom car competitions, awards for custom paint are as highly sought after as awards for the cars themselves.

Engine swaps

LS1 V8 engine swap in a Mazda RX-7 FD

Main article: Engine swap

Engine swaps are a common modification involving taking the engine from one car and putting it into another, often one that did not initially come with that engine. A few of the most common engines swaped into other vehicles include the BMW M54, Chevy small block, Chevy LS, Chrysler Hemi, Cummins B Series, Ford Barra, Ford Coyote, Ford flathead V8, Honda B, Honda K, Mazda 13B, Nissan RB, Nissan SR, Subaru EJ, Toyota JZ, Toyota UZ, Toyota S, and Volkswagen VR6.Completing an engine swap typically requires a high level of modification and fabrication to fit the engine and connect it to the host vehicle's body, transmission, and electrics. Many companies sell kits for common engine swaps that include adapter plates for the transmission, K member, engine mounts, front subframe, and more, depending on what ss required for the particular swap. Some engine swaps will use the vehicle's original transmission, while others opt for the transmission from the donor car, or a different transmission entirely.