In the age of social media where likes, subscriptions, and shares are the new currency, some are taking things to extreme lengths. A bizarre trend is gaining traction where people vandalize their own vehicles, all in the name of clicks and clout.
Some use paint, some use props, and several of them put things on their car that would make my mother blush. They may or may not realize that they’re following in the footsteps of publicity firms of a decade ago.
Here’s a deeper look at the trend of marking up one’s own ride for a little extra rizz, how to spot the real thing compared to these clout chasers, and a tad about what it says about the pursuit of online fame.
Last week, the photo above gained some traction on Reddit. Almost immediately people called it out for being fake. They point out features like the fact that this isn’t real spray paint and that it would’ve taken quite a bit of time to do everything seen here.
It’s not hard to get confirmation that people are doing this intentionally either. Those looking for likes and shares openly admit it.
Then there’s the somewhat famous Subaru Legacy Ch3ater car. It goes a little harder than just using easily washed-off paint markers. The paint in this case is real spray paint and it stays on this car. On top of that, it has caution tape on it and what looks like dripping blood.
Again though, that’s all by design as the owner, Perry Sullivan, told Boston.com. “Writing “CHEATER” on the side of the car was something he and his roommate, Cheryl, came up with last year.” He changes it up depending on the year and holiday too. He’s even wrapped it like a present for Christmas.
One Toyota Supra owner tells The Autopian “It’s a TikTok trend that a ton of people are doing. It’s a stunt many people are doing in the car community.” He tried it out himself on his own sports car and it was eye-catching enough that random people posted about it online.
Cheater Outed On Car – Real Or Faked
byu/Shawn_Of_The_Shred inCalgary
Here’s the real kicker though. PR firms have been doing this sort of thing since 2014. Back then, the TV Channel Bravo towed a pair of Porsche 911s spray painted with similar themes around New York as an advertisement for its show Girlfriends Guide To Divorce.
Andrew Bloch, a marketing consultant actually posted about that incident and similar stunts that included a white Range Rover in the UK.
PR Stunt of the Day: Vandalised cars promote 'Girlfriends Guide To Divorce' on Bravo #GG2D pic.twitter.com/Y4ekjgmoYc
— Andrew Bloch (@AndrewBloch) May 4, 2016
In 2017, another business Max Pro Hair did something almost identical down to the color of the paint, the locations, and the phrases on a black Lamborghini Gallardo. According to them, the stunt garnered over two million views.
All of these instances take inspiration from the real thing though. At times, people really do vandalize cars and leave them a lot worse off than anything we’ve seen so far. Broken windows, broken lights, deep key scratches, and more permanent paint are all signs that the vandalism is indeed genuine.
On the flip side, if those things aren’t in plain view, there’s a decent chance these days that the car you might see with paint on it is just a publicity stunt. Take a good long look, maybe even a photo or two, you might be making somebody’s day in the process.
This is an Autopian article that really wasn’t needed- not interesting
Many years ago I was at a dealership shopping around. They were touting their new “paint protection scheme” of some sort or another. The sales creep was on me constantly begging me to take the can of spray paint in hand and spray the car. Begging me over and over and over. I finally relented and started to spray on the hood and continued and lingered over vents in the hood to get paint into the engine compartment. You want to be an ass, I’ll see you and up the ante.
This feels like a Trailer Park Boys/IASIP skit. Ricky or Charlie decide to beat up their car to get sympathy clicks, accidentally ruin it.
I deliberately buy cars with shabby paintwork so I won’t worry about them getting scratched.
I can’t intentionally scratch them though.
Ugh gross.
The Jessie Smollett edition.
Can we please go back to usenet, telnet, uucp, dig, the whole stack. I’d cough up a Benjamin to spend 3 unattended minutes with a maul and their car
SAD! 🙁
The internets were a mistake
(**he says while posting a comment on the internets**)
If you need to make crap up to make content, you’re doing it wrong!
Self-vandalism has existed as long as cars have, and it got popular int eh late 90s with Fast and the Furious. Most of those tasteless mods amount to vandalism LOL
How to tell if real or fake, a window or panel will always be be smashed if real.
Honest question – assuming one’s ambition isn’t to get to multi-million follower status so that you can get paid for advertising on your social media platform of choice (and these sorts of stunts seem unlikely to me to get anyone to that exalted level), what is the motivation behind trying to generate ‘clicks’ and ‘likes’? Is there a way besides corporate sponsorship of the kind I describe in my first sentence to monetize things like follower count and “engagement” (whatever that is and however it is quantified)?
This might be very obvious to a large subset of people, but please keep in mind I’m a fairly introverted engineer in his 40’s, so it is entirely possible there is a whole social media economy that ‘everyone’ knows about that I’m completely ignorant of…
My understanding is that “likes” and such are a way to quantify your position in the social hierarchy.
Think of it as money that doesn’t pay the bills.
Disclaimer: I’m a misanthropic engineer in my 30s, I may be wrong here.
Online interaction has replaced physical social interaction. As the youngin’s put it, “Headspace got more than meatspace.” There’s an increasing crisis of isolation in the modern world and with social media constantly raising the ceiling for what’s exceptional people’s feelings of insecurity about their normality have never been stronger in human history. This exceptional status is being reinforced by the dwindling number of opportunities for advancement both socially and financially. Because the ceiling for exceptionality is constantly rising people mistakenly believe the floor for mediocrity is constantly rising, and thus they perform more and more extreme acts to gain the attention they believe is necessary to prove themselves exceptional. You are no longer notable for having been the state championship winning highschool quarterback five years ago, now you must be the galactic championship winning glitzball pitcher four years in a row who has also married and divorced the past three Miss Universes in order and who funds a professional glitzball development program by selling your signed dirty socks via livestream auction.
The vicious part is that these systems designed for interaction have turned some of this extrinsic motivation for self validation intrinsic as those who believe the need for ever increasing exceptionality become the new arbiters of position and hierarchy. If you can’t code in seven different programming languages including one that’s been dead since the mid 1970s you aren’t qualified for the job of throwing together JavaScript frameworks using a node system you interact with via a mouse.
I love the modern world.
In parts of England “clout” is a slang term for a woman’s lady parts.
I had to Google to find out what this headline meant, because I found it deeply confusing.
Then, once I understood that people were vandalising their own cars for internet points, I was an entirely new kind of deeply confused.
“Clout” chasing in your local context makes perfect sense. In the article’s context……not so much.
I blame Carrie Underwood.
That’s not how you vandalize a car.
This is how you vandalize a car.
https://youtu.be/siZQX98TsJ0?si=mLNB0Gy-rr2p-UmY
Um actually, that’s not a clip of Taillight Ruiners
That must have been physically painful for Torch to participate in.
THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FIND A STRANGER IN THE ALPS!!!
Moral of the story: Shock and outrage draws attention better than most anything..
Yeah. Sadly, it’s like 95% of the internet it seems. Makes me glad to be here in the 5% for sure.
I place no blame on the creators. If it wasn’t a viable way to make money, they would not do such things. The blame lies squarely on the people who are willing to pay to watch creators who do such things.
Eh. The broader framework of this issue is pretty heavily discussed in economics more generally, and there is no real “right answer,” or they are all correct answers. (Laffer Curve vs. Keynesian theory, etc., blah blah blah.) When you need both to initiate their end of the transaction in order to make the whole happen, on whom do you pin attribution (what we subjectively call “blame” here)?
Me, I ABSOLUTELY blame the creators, but I also believe them to be rational actors. I also blame, to a lesser degree (because it’s a less deliberate act / they were not the initiators), the people that click and watch long enough for that engagement to monetize.
Western legal framework is also based on placing more blame on the person that first “did stuff.” (I’m not a legal scholar; I do not know what this principle / theory is technically called.) Think drug dealer vs. drug user.
“These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know … morons.”
May they rot in hell. They obviously care about attention and not cars.
Social media might completely destroy humanity before climate change gets a chance to….
“The Decline of Western Civilization Part V: The Influencer Years”
V, like, isn’t even a number, what are you even talking about?
Like and subscribe!
This comment is criminally under-liked. Take my smiley! (couldn’t find the ‘subscribe’ button, nor a bell to ‘smack’…)
When I was young, vandals used a key on your car. These people need to go talk to the old vandals for inspiration.
The fun ones used a shovel to achieve the three Ss: Scratch, score, and smash. Just don’t get one of the ones with a fiberglass or plastic handle because by the time you’re done your wrists will be killing you. Assuming the car’s owner doesn’t kill you first.
Amateurs. If I wanted to vandalize my own car for attention, I’d do it the right way: buying all the finest Autozone stick-on nonsense and going to town. Maybe some Honk if you Honk bumper sticker spam too.
Dang. Can I honk if I only tonk?
The need for approval and attention–to be liked–has resulted in some fine comedy and music and on and on. I wonder what these people would produce if they work at it as hard and as long as our most influential artists do.
Lame.