For car enthusiasts, the question of whether a person should modify their car may seem like a fait accompli. Of course they should. Making your car perfect is what life’s about right? The question is a little more complicated than that though. You have to consider it from all sorts of different perspectives, including the cost, the potential legal consequences and the feasibility of your car’s future utility. Car enthusiasts spend immense amounts of money each year on their passion, and the industry is not likely to stop anytime soon. However, if you are wondering whether it is a good idea for your car, here are a few things to consider:
The cost of car modification is obvious, but the perhaps less obvious aspect is that when you make changes to your car, you have to spend a lot more money maintaining those changes. When someone buys a regular car and just uses it to get to work and back, they have to pay for a MOT every year. You can easily imagine how much it would cost to have a special MOT conducted for a car that no longer conforms to any specifications and for which there is no existing information. Besides, if you lower your car for instance, you may think that you can just start enjoying the new look. However, you will then learn that you’ll need to get extra parts to make sure your suspension geometry is not ruined. That is just the start though. With each new addition or change, you will need to tweak something else that has been changed slightly, which necessitates something else be corrected and so on.
Those are just the practical aspects though. If you spend most of your time and money improving the visuals aspects of your vehicle, you will concomitantly have to spend lots of time and money repairing them when they suffer a minor scratch or scuff. For instance, you only have to worry about alloy wheel refurbishment if you have alloy wheels. Many people, while they may be annoyed for half an hour, would not worry if their car was superficially damaged. If the car still runs and if safe to drive, it does not matter to those people. However, if you spend thousands of pounds, one tiny scratch is a big deal.
There are legal issues too. Window tinting may look good but it is a dangerous modification in some circumstances. If the police cannot see into your vehicle, they are going to stop you. Not only that, if you cannot see out well enough, you may not be able to drive safely. This is why the government enforces the rule that tinted windows on cars used after 1985 should have their windscreen able to let in 75% of light while their front side windows should let at least 70% of light through.
Since modified cars are ostensibly worth more and many are not as easy to drive as a result of the modifications, insurance costs may be much higher on these models. The question of whether it is worth it remains with you though.