A lot of the time, when people look for a car customisation service, they intend to add their unique fingerprint and personality to a car that is already fairly beloved.
A great car can become even more special with personalised detailing, wrapping and tweaks that make it special, and the only limit is the imagination of the owner and the designer.
However, what if you wanted to go further? What if you wanted to fix a car that rolled out of the factory floor fundamentally flawed? Could modifications fix that?
The answer, rather remarkably, is not only that it can, but that it might not even necessarily take as much work as one might expect.
Fixing The Malaise Era
Arguably the most infamous era in car manufacturing was the collapse of the United States car industry from the 1970s up until 1983 was the Malaise Era, brought about in no small part by the United States’ remarkable surprise that there was not an infinite supply of petrol after all.
Following two major oil crises in 1973 and 1979 and a rather famous speech by then-President Jimmy Carter (who did not once use the word malaise), the United States in general and the Motor City of Detroit in specific were in a period of decline.
The American motor industry had typically acted rather independently from the rest of the world, creating huge, powerful muscle cars designed to be made even bigger and more powerful through modification.
It was based on an idea that the good times would never end, but an oil crisis, as well as criticism of the lack of safety and changes to emissions guidelines led to radical changes.
The first part of this was the Chevrolet Corvair of the 1960s, a car described by consumer activist Ralph Nader as “The One-Car Accident” or a car that was “unsafe at any speed”.
This led to sweeping changes to the design of cars to require larger deformable bumpers, which typically protruded from the extremities of many American cars.
This combined with emissions and fuel economy guidelines led to car engines producing half of the power they used to create cars that were almost undrivable.
Many cars had raised suspensions due to other safety guidelines, which led to some rather dubious methods used to reach the standards that compromised the ability of the car to turn corners.
However, these problems, as well as a lot of issues with the quality of interiors and paint detailing could be fixed by specialists, creating cars that were better than new.
This is not a new concept in the car modification world, often known as a restomod. The bumpers could be replaced, the paintwork improved, the engine modified and the suspension sliced or replaced entirely.
The main difference between this and most restomods, however, is that whilst the goal of a typical restomod is to create a better version of an old classic using modern technology, a restomod of a car that was bad to begin with utterly transforms it.
One of the best examples of this is the Ford Mustang II, perhaps one of the most infamous Malaise Era cars ever made.
The original Mustang was one of the most popular muscle cars on the market, designed to be as much a platform for modification as it was a car in its own right, most famously through the modified cars made by the late Carroll Shelby.
By contrast, the Ford Mustang II was a far more worthy endeavour, designed to be a relatively fuel-efficient fun economy car more akin to the much more recent concept of the hot hatchback rather than a traditional pony car.
It was a very popular car at its time; although it was often seen at best to be a necessary evil it was the car that needed to be made to keep the American car industry from collapsing entirely.
However, even then, it was highly criticised for poor handling, being compared unfavourably to the infamous AMC Gremlin and the even more infamous Ford Pinto, with which it shares a platform.
Whilst the Mustang II did not have the same issues with exploding that the Pinto did it was seen in retrospect as a car just as damaging, but it is also the perfect candidate for a restomod to fix it and make it drive more like a Mustang is supposed to.
Other cars such as the Chevrolet Corvette C3 and the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am have also been popular candidates for modification, partly because they at least look like they have the potential to be good cars.
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