
Vandalize Your Car - mac01021
https://jalopnik.com/why-you-should-give-your-car-a-shitty-paint-job-1795704984/
======
michaelt

      Would you drive differently if
      your real name was spray
      painted across your trunk lid?
    

Here in the UK, many tradespeople drive white vans emblazoned with the contact
details for their business (there are also many unmarked white vans on the
roads).

White Van Man's reputation for considerate driving is, to be charitable, not
above average.

~~~
badfrog
Same here in the Northeast US. People driving work vehicles seem to be in a
huge hurry to get to/from the job. It's especially scary as a
pedestrian/cyclist because they're usually very large and fairly old vehicles.

~~~
feedbeef
My general experience as pedestrian is that while commercial vehicle drivers
speed, they seem focused and give a wide berth when passing, whereas regular
drivers often explore their sociopathic tendencies when passing.

------
NickBusey
"Driving a wildly painted car is like using my real name on the internet.

Is it uncomfortable?

Yeah. Sometimes it is. Honesty and transparency can be searing. But it’s also
real."

~~~
whatshisface
I would disagree that using your real name is more real than using a
pseudonym, because it heavily pressures you to use the same filter you have in
real life. On the other hand, when you're using a pseudonym there are fewer
consequences for revealing what you really think.

~~~
ivolimmen
So you think I dare not to disagree with you because I use my real name? Plus
that I filter what I say? Bold statement. I always speak my mind but that
might also be because of my Dutch upbringing. I am direct and brutally honest
offline and online.

~~~
scanny
Put yourself in the situation where your views go against what society may
deem as acceptable, and given that it is tied to your real name there can be
very real consequences (harassment/government action).

Would you speak out the same if you knew that your community would feel very
strongly against you for it?

------
URSpider94
Long ago I read a story, which I can’t source now so it may be apocryphal,
about author CS Lewis. As the story goes, after the Narnia series got popular,
he made enough money to buy himself a very nice Jaguar. The first thing he did
was to take a hammer to the car and dent it all over. His thinking was, if he
did that himself, he would avoid the inevitable pain from every time someone
slammed their door into his, or tapped the bumper in a parking lot.

~~~
whatshisface
Some great advice for all of those fresh tech millionaires out there is that
you should always buy a car at least an order of magnitude below what you can
afford, for exactly that reason.

~~~
steverb
I still use the one pay check rule for cars. If it costs more than I make in
one pay check, then I can't afford it. It has been a good incentive to get
better pay checks. :-)

------
NKosmatos
I’d love to do something similar, but the Greek law doesn’t allow it. The car
registration must clearly state the manufacturer color(s). Try
describing/putting the graffiti into this field :-) We’re not even allowed
custom license plates.

~~~
avar
Are you sure? In The Netherlands you must notify the government if you change
the color of the car so they can update the registry, if there's any doubt
they'll help you pick.

The list of colors is finite and based on EU law[1][2], so it would be odd if
Greece didn't share the same system. It would mean you couldn't import re-
painted vehicles into Greece, maybe that's true, but that seems like it
wouldn't fly with the single market.

The car in the article clearly has a base color of "yellow". On my street
there's a car completely covered in stickers, to my eye it's mostly white, but
looking it up I see it's registered as blue (barely any blue visible). So
perhaps covering it in stickers is a way to get around this in some areas of
the EU.

1\. [https://www.rdw.nl/particulier/voertuigen/auto/het-
kentekenb...](https://www.rdw.nl/particulier/voertuigen/auto/het-
kentekenbewijs/bij-wijzigingen/kleur-van-uw-voertuig-wijzigen)

2\. It's: blue, brown, yellow, gray, green, orange, violet, red, white, black.
Anything not listed must be whatever color is closest, e.g. pink is either
"white" or "red" depending on if it's light pink or not.

~~~
NKosmatos
Changing the color is allowed, but you can’t have graffiti or fancy
designs(flames, clouds, waves...). You’re right about the stickers, they’re
allowed but haven’t seen any fancy designs, mostly lines, stripes and a few
numbers. I’m sure that if the whole body was covered you’d get into trouble
here.

~~~
Lunatic666
That's a surprise for me, in Germany you can do whatever you want color wise
without having to update the car license. If a car comes with multiple colors
from the factory the documentation says "multi-colored"

~~~
bebna
U do are limited in the amount of chrome and reflective material on the car.

------
nickthemagicman
I wanted to make fun of this but it's really good look at the constricting
forces of conformity in our lives that we all just pretty much follow
unawares.

~~~
justinator
I mean, owning a car is still a form of conforming to social norms - cars are
expensive and people have good jobs to afford them (which begins an awkward
feedback loop of requirements).

Try living without one. As a 38-year-old car free man, I feel almost
_deviant_. In great shape from all that fresh and and exercise, but that also
is somewhat peculiar (I don't look much like my age).

~~~
Noos
I have lived without one, and for that time in my life, i was limited to ten
miles in every direction, unless i wanted to spend an hour on a bus. I don't
think people here get how limiting that life can be anywhere outside of a huge
city.

Or how wearying. I walked to work, and it took 45 minutes. I had to do that
walk during 90 degree heat, 6 inches of snow the ground, heavy rainstorms etc,
unless, like other people I knew without a car, we begged our coworkers for a
ride. If we couldn't, we had to call out of work.

We have plenty of people in my small town who walk or moped to work because
they are poor. They usually buy cars the first thing they can get, because
walking sucks.

~~~
benrbray
Bicycle infrastructure would be a comparatively cheap solution to this problem
for most people.

------
Dylan16807
The ideas about noticing other people are nice but if customized cars were
common nobody would notice them either.

And yes people _would_ still zone out while driving, sorry.

~~~
perl4ever
If everybody had tattoos, they would still be identifying marks.

~~~
icebraining
But we already have identifying marks: license plates. What the paint job here
does is make the car stand out, which is a different thing.

------
Thorrez
Just make sure not to vandalize it as much as much as Linus Sebastian's car at
LTX 2018.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCSyNKbapdE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCSyNKbapdE)

------
zhoujianfu
I have a recognizable crazy wrap and the license plate “fart gas” and pretty
quickly realized I’m not really “anonymous” anymore and it does make me at
least try to drive “nicer.”

------
Causality1
The ugliest thing about that car is the godawful off-center front license
plate.

~~~
jjjensen90
It is unfortunate, but the Evo has a front-mount intercooler to cool the
turbocharger, a necessary and large piece of performance equipment.

~~~
noipv4
EVO X is a turbo 4 cylinder and there's a FMIC to cool the compressed air (~25
psi stock). This offset license plate is also common with some high
performance AUDI RS cars and Alfa Romeos.

------
tbabb
Being recognizable is maybe one thing I could get past for the cool factor of
having a unique paint job.

But that's also a commitment to nuke your resale value. If you plan on
replacing the car before it's scrap, vandalizing it like in the article could
be a ~$10k decision.

~~~
paggle
You can get it vinyl wrapped before “vandalizing” for a few hundred bucks.
That actually improves the resale value since when you peel it before selling
the original paint job will be in much better condition having been protected.

------
HoveringOrb
Well, it's no uglier than my stock gray Focus.

------
ct520
Well glad to see this went ok. A local art museum had a "Art on tap night"
with a free style area. A bunch of guys with paint and ipa's quickly devolved
into 1st grade styled wieners scribbled everywhere. Sort of what I expected
when clicking on this article and strangers.

------
Corrado
I drove a yellow Audi A4 for almost 20 years and felt a bit like the person in
this article. Now quite that extreme, but yeah, I could tell people were
looking and they always knew who I was. It did make me think twice about
parking out front of the adult bookstore once or twice.

------
whenchamenia
I drive a Very disticnt custom car. The random people that 'know' me from
traffic is staggering. It has changed me as a person, but like a mokawk, is
not for everyone.

------
tudorw
'Anti-Theft' paintwork...

~~~
ggggtez
It probably has the opposite effect: Make thieves think they can smash and
grab whatever is inside with impunity, since you obviously don't care about
damaging it either.

------
dogma1138
AKA How to get pulled over at every traffic stop you ever pass by.

~~~
anigbrowl
Be clean, put a camera on the dash, sue the police, profit.

~~~
dogma1138
The world does not start and ends with the US, one of my colleagues had one of
the first 10 model S’s in the UK he haven’t been pulled over for like 5 years
before that he still jokes about being pulled over 13 times during the first
week because the cops just wanted to take a peek at the car.

Driving a flashy car has implications like it or not, driving an obnoxiously
flashy car is even worse.

And in the US it’s likely even worse since a traffic stop is one of the most
dangerous interactions you can have with the police.

It also has other implications, parked at a block you don’t live on around the
time a crime occurred? Well take a guess which car would be definitely
reported as suspicious during the testimony sweep...

P.S. I’ve seen conflicted studies about the benefits of a dash cam or stating
to the police you are filing the engagement; while some studies show it
reduces the “aggression” officers might display others show that it increases
the chances of them basically wanting to fuck with you; if you think you can
never be baited into acting out or they can’t confuse you during questioning
to give a contradictory statement e.g. asking where you’ve been and where you
are going multiple times then by all means drive what ever you want.

I would rather minimize my interaction with the police because I can’t think
of a single interaction with them that would be objectively pleasant under all
conditions and I can’t guarantee that they won’t catch me on a bad day when
I’m in a pissy mood and I might act or say something that could be taken as
aggressive or suspicious.

~~~
llukas
"land of the free and scared" \- unfortunately

~~~
dogma1138
I’m not American nor do I live in the states, I wouldn’t do this shit in the
UK where the cops are not even armed either.

------
pvaldes
I bet that the novelty will wear off in a few weeks. Now her car is just plain
ugly.

If you want to customize your car at least do it well.

~~~
dannyw
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

~~~
pvaldes
... but knowledge can lead to much more satisfactory results.

This is not how you paint a car, with cheap products and any lack of direction
in the art part.

Professional grade car paint is really expensive stuff, for several good
reasons: It does not change color or fade overnight and often has metallic
dust or some kind of pearly "glitter" embebbed.

A professional car painter will add also a hard layer of lacquer to protect
the painting, uniformize the design, and add reflections and gloss (sorely
lacking there). The car will not reflect light in the same way as a propperly
painted work and will gets scratched and worn in no time.

The design here is multicolor but totally flat and random (there is science in
arranging adjacent colors also). Artistically is a mess. There are not sharp
borders defining areas and gradients are badly executed. Not a common theme or
a good idea to express, just plain chaos (in a not good way).

Of course she can made anything with her car but lets not pretend that is a
great job, not even mediocre. There are two good examples of how you made a
unique car:

[https://dyler.com/cars/3724/bmw-i8-rene-turrek-joker-
theme-c...](https://dyler.com/cars/3724/bmw-i8-rene-turrek-joker-theme-
coupe-2016-multicolor-for-sale)

[https://www.rollingstone.it/musica/news-musica/la-porsche-
di...](https://www.rollingstone.it/musica/news-musica/la-porsche-di-janis-
joplin-sara-messa-allasta/281908/)

~~~
steverb
I don't think you and the author share the same definition of what
satisfactory results mean. She seems pretty satisfied with it.

You're right, she may hate it in a month or six, but she's happy with it now
and I'm pretty sure she knows how to go get a professional paint job if she
wants to.

------
paggle
The downside of customization is that you lose your anonymity. I had a
memorable vanity plate for two years that I gave up to regain the anonymity I
prefer in my car.

------
knolax
It probably doesn't look as good IRL without all the filters used in the
photos the article uses.

