Rev up your engines, today I’m gonna talk about some of the worst trends in modern car design, and as far as I’m concerned the worst one are those massive giant grills that all the manufacturers seem to be copying each other and putting on, like the Lexus grills, now yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder but those massive grilles are just absurd, because in many of them a large portion of that grille does nothing, it’s actually just covering up part of the frame of the vehicle it’s not that air is going through the whole thing and cooling the car down, now as a counterpoint to that, hey I had a 2013 Shelby gt500, it didn’t even have a grill it just had a giant gaping hole because it needed a hole that big to suck enough air in, so that it could go 200 miles an hour and cool the car down without it overeating, not that anybody really needs a car that can go 200 miles an hour, but at least that’s form following function not just some absurd ridiculous looking massive grill, now they’re all coming out with it, when I was a young mechanic the Americans had the Fin Wars, they kept making the fins bigger and bigger and bigger, and they served no purpose either it wasn’t like those things were going 240 miles an hour it didn’t make them that much more aerodynamic, they just liked the look at these giant fins coming out of the back of them, the next bad trend is turning everything into an SUV, Hey there are now Porsche SUVs, Lamborghini SUVs, even Bentley SUVs, because mark my words, not just a stylish thing, but they’re big vehicles they’re high up in the air, almost all of them get pretty poor gas mileage, in the future when the price of gas goes up, these things are not going to be as popular, and many of them come in all-wheel-drive, fine if you live in a snowy area or something but in normal driving in places like here in Texas, you get worse gas mileage as all-wheel drive, it cost more money to fix, it costs more money to build, you have to buy all four new tires when you need a tire, because if some tires are off size from the others, that will ruin the all-wheel drive system and cost you thousands to fix, which a lot of people don’t really understand until it happens to them, now another trend that I think is bad is the trend towards removal of not only full-size spares in a car, this Lexus still has a full-size spare, to the use of those mini spares, this matrix only has one of those little donut spares inside here, to some modern cars that have no spare tires at all and even have an air pump or the run flat tires and you can drive on when they run out of air, really run flat tires they cost a fortune if you get a flat on that cost a fortune to fix, and because of their inherent design of being strong, they actually get worse gas mileage, because they have more friction in them driving down the road, and at least that’s a trend that seems to already be going away, they seem to be giving up with these run-flat tires, I mean you have a problem where your tires shredded, even the run flat tires can get shredded, you’re gonna be stranded in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing better than a real spare tire that you can put on and go your merry way, now the next trend I’d like to see go away is the use of those ultra low-profile tires, now this lexus has normal tires and they serve a very good purpose big sidewalls they absorb bumps so they ride smoother, they can go through potholes without getting serious damage and they protect the rim, these aren’t cheap rims, if you go to these real low-profile tires, some of those cars ride like wagons, you feel every bump, if you live in a city like me with pothole roads, or in a country road with pothole roads for that matter, they will eat the rims up I’ve seen guys just destroy the tire and the rims on just a medium sized pot hole, yeah you can zoom around in them and corner real fast and stuff but for a normal driving car they’re kind of stupid I’ve had many BMW customers that cursed the day they got one with these low-profile tires, they kept having to buy tire after tire after tire, their super expensive tires and a lot of times they end up the rims too, that’s money wasted that you never need to spend if you just have normal tires that work perfectly fine, now the next thing that I find stupid and a ridiculous trend is the installation of fake vents on a car, for example the Buick envision has fake air scoops on hood, they don’t do anything they’re fake they’re just stuck on there, they don’t suck air or anything it’s just kind of ridiculous, and along the same vein the fake exhaust tips coming out of a car, even Mercedes getting into it, they put these space-age looking things come out of the back but there’s just regular round pipes going into them, they don’t serve any purpose at all, they’re just fake to look like they’re doing something they aren’t, now the next bad trend as far as I’m concerned is those bejeweled headlights so that at night your car looks like a spider with all those eyes on it, they look weird enough but personally I find them very annoying when people are coming at you on the other side of the highway if it’s just a little divided highway with not much room between, they kind of blind you with all those lights coming out at you they make you want to wear your sunglasses at night, hey I already do that, and the last trend, one that I really can’t stand is the use of plastics for these headlight assemblies, that’s one thing I had to replace on this Lexus cuz the old ones just got all foggy and cracked, but this is a trend that I know they’re not gonna go away from, because it’s cheaper to make plastic, and you can make it any shape you want to fit any design, but really plastic, clear plastic the headlight you know what’s gonna fog up over time rocks are gonna hit it, it’s not such a hot idea, now if you watch some of my videos I show you ways that you can protect these plastic headlights so they lasts as long as possible, but hey when I was young they were glass headlights you never had to think about anything and if they did crack those glass headlights in those days cost like 5 bucks versus many of hundreds of dollars for the OEM ones and when you go aftermarket a lot of times the aftermarket ones, they’re so poorly made they crack too really fast, so now you know some of the worst trends in modern cars, now let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope they don’t come up with a whole bunch of new ones in the future, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!
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