When you think of car modifications, or mods if you want to be all cool about it, stuff like cams and exhausts and cold-air intakes undoubtedly come to mind. Well today, we’re not talking about those kinds of mods. Nope, for this edition of Autopian Asks, we want to hear about the creative solutions you’ve employed to solve irksome problems that make your car a less pleasant place to spend time than it needs to be.
The aftermarket has always been happy to oblige in the irksome-problem arena, of course. Oldsters like me perused pages of dubious doo-dads in ever-present JC Whitney catalogs, and one could hardly get through a Saturday afternoon of Creature Double Feature without encountering an ad for some K-Tel or Ronco whatsit that was totally precision-engineered for more convenient motoring.
Amazon
Even through the 80s and early 90s, many cars and trucks were shockingly ill-equipped when it came to such niceties as cup holders and storage space beyond the glove compartment and a dash cubby suitable for maybe a wallet, or a pouch of Big League Chew, or a couple of cassette tapes. So you’d go to K-Mart and get some plastic thing to (barely) hold your drinks tapes and all the coins you had to keep handy for toll booths. Remember toll booths? Terrible. But these are all ready-made problem-solvers–accessories, not modifications. What we really want to hear about are your homebrewed workarounds for suboptimal car ergonomics and equiment.
Amazon; FitFreak.net
Consider the first run of Honda Fits to reach American shores (and later gens?), which featured a center armrest that was the perfect height for comfortable arm resting provided your right humerus was about a third longer than that of a typical human. This demographic turned out to be way, way smaller than Honda anticipated. But hey, no problem: just strap a yoga block on there and problem solved.
David Tracy
And let’s pause to appreciate David’s Uber driver’s well-placed pad that prevents pebble-grained plastic from abrading his baby-soft knees. I did a similar thing with my 2015 RAV4, which has its door pull in the exact-right spot to punish my left patella. I zip-tied a pink kitchen sponge (yes, a new one, thanks for asking) to the handle, and presto–instant relief. My wife removed it equally instantly, citing ridiculousness, so now I just tuck my hat between my knee and the door, which is almost as good.
What kind of ingenious car-livability modifications and fixes and (OK, fine) hacks have you made to your cars, past or present? To the comments!
I have a cupholder console sitting on the transmission hump in my 1995 F-150.
In my 2013 Focus ST I bought an ebay kit with a bunch of rubber mats for the various storage pockets and cupholders. That does a nice job of keeping things from sliding around.
My F-150 has a smooth plastic shelf on top of the dashboard, some rubber shelf liner lets me put things like sunglasses up there without them sliding around.
For the 2015 Forester – replaced the stereo with an CarPlay compatible model and routed a lightning cable inside the dash to the cubby below the stereo. Replaced the turn signal relay with a unit that includes tap to change lanes functionality (little thing but so nice to have). Added an LED light inside the hatch which massively improves the interior lighting situation.
For the GTI – built a skateboard rack for the luggage cover, dash mounted iPhone dock with power cord routed inside the dash, and tinted the side mirror glass. Also a bunch of VagCom tweaks.
not on either of my cars, but my motorcycle (a cheap little bike called an rps hawk 250), the choke adjustment was bolted to the engine block beside the exhaust. If you needed to adjust it on the fly, Goodluck. I ran some brake cable up and now have a little adjuster lever mounted to a fairing connector on my gas tank.
I’m working on upgrading the oem navigation in our 14 Hyundai Elantra GT to one out of a MY 16. Why? They are the exact same physical dimensions, but the 16 has an SD card slot which allows it to be updated to support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and allows map updates which is awesome for when you are out of cell reception.
Full cage, racing seat, five-point harness, fire suppression system, tow hooks, kill switch, numbers on the hood and doors, removal of the headliner, the door cards, the remaining seats, and all sound-deadening material, all of this combined with the other typical livability modifications for a daily driver:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52766800548_dc5fe0a28c_c.jpg
It got me to work this morning so I assume I’m on the right track, so to speak.
Alignment! I can’t recommend getting an alignment done by good shop with an actual expert enough. The stock Mitsubishi alignment for my Lancer likes to pull to one side and feels sloppy as hell. I took it to a shop, explaining that yes, I actually put this silly thing on a race track, and I would like to improve its turn-in. Voila! I now have a car that tracks straight better than it ever did before in addition to turning in sharper.
I know most of these are going to be interior bits, but trust me, alignment is a big livability upgrade when you live in the middle of a state where the distance to assorted fun things you’d like to do is typically measured in hours.
alignments are such an amazing livability thing, like sure mines an garage alignment because im a broke college kid, but it made driving my car soo much nicer. now just to get my front passenger tire rebalanced, I lost a weight somewhere and now it shakes
The cup holders on my 1990 Caravan are about 3/4″ deep and the only purpose they serve is to ensure that cups are upside down when they fall out of them. Driving with a full XL coffee from Dunkin in one is like one one of those races where you balance an egg on a spoon.
My solution is a rubber 2″ to 3″ intercooler hose adapter that fits snugly in the factory cupholder making it about 3″ deep and is flared out at the top to handle modern beverage containers.
Mud flaps on my Raptor to keep the stones and crud the tires toss all day off my doors and rear fenders.
I have a car with a black leather interior and I spend most of the year in Tucson, AZ, the rest in Colorado, both fairly sunny places. You’re goddamn right I have tinted windows. They don’t mean nothin’, they know who’s inside.
Anyway, next upgrade is to get a stereo with Android Auto capability. Play my tunes off the phone primarily. I have somewhere over 100GB of MP3 files on my phone which I use for entertainment. I have a little FM transmitter bluetooth thingy now, but proper integration will be better.
Here’s the list of modifications I made to my dearly departed 1986 Chevrolet Celebrity during the early 1990s. I got the car on the cheap from the fleet and fixed it up for the cheap. While I liked the car, I didn’t like several issues that came with the car as “standard equipment”.
Since I drove a lot of times in the rural areas outside Dallas, the factory headlamps gotta go. I replaced them with HELLA H4 and H1 and beefed up the cables and relays for higher wattage 80w/100w H4 and 100w H1 bulbs. I installed the parking lamps inside the headlamp capsules. That made the driving on the dark roads less stressful. (About $80 for the whole set and about $50 for the bulbs: the most expensive modification).
I got tired of close calls when changing the lanes on the highways thanks to impossibly tiny bulb in the side running lamp and retroreflective markers. I installed the rectangular Lancia Thema (Series 1) side turn signal repeaters. They are incredibly useful and got the ultimate attention from the inattentive drivers. I don’t know why they weren’t mandated in the US. (About DM 20 for both).
I also rearranged the cables so that taillamps had the separate turn signal indicators and brake lamps. The modification was pretty easy. I would have tried changing the lens colour from red to amber, but I didn’t have experience or proper equipment to do so. (About 50 cents for the cables, joiners, and soldering wire).
I would want to replace the external rear-view mirrors that was fixed and immobile with ones made by Trevi for the first-generation FWD Pontiac Bonneville SSE that moved when pushed and reverted back to original position. No luck…
The seat back was leaning way too far back for my comfort. I swapped the brackets that attach the seat back to the seat as to move the seat back forward a couple of inches. That made them more comfortable for long drives. (Free modification)
The seat belts had the comfort feature that the shoulder belt would slack more as you lean forward. I hated it and had to yank it hard to “reset” it. So, I removed the offending mechanism (a small hook and spring), and the shoulder belt stayed firm on my body instead of sagging out. (Free modification)
Lastly, I used the Tamiya Acrylic X-27 clear red paint to coat the bulbs in the instrument clusters. This reduced the eye fatigues during the long drive in the rural areas.
I take out the stock crappy radio and replace it with something better. Currently I’m putting in double DIN radios with a touchscreen that have SXM and Android Auto capability.
Man, I wish manufacturers would go back to more modular sound systems. The people who care can rip out the stock stuff and do what they want, and the people who don’t care don’t have to pay for a system integrated with the touch screen, the CAN BUS or the damn HVAC system.
Straight out of college with very little money and no job, I bought a ’79 Subaru Brat from a friend. I loved that carTruck, but its headlights were not very bright and didn’t cast a very wide beam, in part because of how recessed they were into the grill. I added some KC driving lights to the bumper and it was a game changer. That, plus the part-time AWD, got me through The Blizzard of 96 in central Virginia with very little hassle.
I also took some detachable speakers from my boombox and shoved them in the very small space behind the seat; it was a cheap and easy stereo installation.
Two of them come in mind for my 05 Dodge Magnum R/T. One of them was the pink gear selector part that would break off in the gear selector. If this goes, you can’t take your car out of park. I had to fully disassemble the gear selector and replaced it with a metal part and it’s never been an issue ever since.
The other one was the ignition lock going into the dash. The part that holds it in place is a rectangular piece of plastic and there are two screw holes that you screw the ignition lock to. Well, Florida heat has broken it, so when I would push in my key, the entire ignition lock would go in and I couldn’t get the car started. So I took apart part of the dash. I saw where the screws had nothing to hold onto the plastic because it had broken off. I went ahead and put two giant washers over the holes and then put the screws in with the ignition lock. Nobody is ever going to see it and it’s done a damn fine job of keeping it all in place.
2015 Jeep Wrangler – Metal hood clamps are mandatory if you want to avoid serious lift-off at 60 mph. After market LED headlights a must if you want to drive over 30 mph at night. 2005 Mini Cooper – wadded up paper jammed in glove box to keep it closed after latch dies.
I swapped out my interior lights with LEDs in my ’16 JKU; now I can actually see stuff when I unload. Unfortunately, you can’t swap out the lights in the rearview mirror assembly.
First car was an ’87 mercury Lynx L, dressed down in the woeful 80 hp Low Output 1.9L with the equally dismal 4 spd manual.
My mom had two lynx’s (lynxii?), an ’84 RS with the great rally interior and the ’86 XR3 with the 120hp High Output 1.9L and a much better 5 speed. Both of these cars were sitting and had succumbed to rust in the early 90’s because that was part of ford’s business plan. Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same? Ford COULD have taken a page from volvo regarding corrosion, but noooooo, screw you, customers, we have paint and undercoating to not give to you!
First mod came when the clutch friction material failed to make any more friction and barely got me home and into the garage for extraction. So i fired up the long sitting XR3, and promptly removed the better engine and transmission. Come to find out, every single bit of wiring harness, headlight to taillight, was different between the cars, so i stripped them both down, swapped everything that would support my High Output dreams over to the registered, less rusty Lynx and it all worked! not bad for a 17 year old w/ a summer to burn! Good thing i worked in a Ford parts dept, and had access to any manual i needed. Then i figured that ‘While I Was In There (Trademark)’, i would also swap in the cooler rally sport interior with the aviation-style gauges, light check module, factory amplifier w/ “Premium Sound” button (which WILL go into something cool someday, perhaps an exhaust cutout?) and massively better seats. I left most of the rear interior out so that i wouldn’t have to cart my sisters to school (sorry, it’s a two seater), and so that i could fit my Yamaha IT250 in the back hatch without all that pesky interior plastic taking up valuable volume.
First mod after all that? When my friend Ian installed the black electrical tape over the upshift light located front and center in the instrument cluster. Best 80’s car mod ever.
My 2018 Mazda3 didn’t come with anything (other than carpet) over the dead pedal space. Since I work at an OEM, I just walked over to our plastic samples drawer, found a nice hard piece of plastic with adhesive on the back, cut it to size, and slapped it on. Been there ever since. Works great and keeps the carpet nicer in the wintertime.
Hard to imagine modifying a Wrangler, I know. However, we added a dead pedal for comfort and a rubber ducky antenna to keep the clanking to a minimum.
I can’t say I’ve had any specific mods to that relatively small level. Dashcams, subwoofers, fog lights, a lift kit…not really “hacks”.
Closest thing, though, would probably be a mod that was needed for my old conversion van’s subwoofers. The box (for two 10″ subs) just barely wouldn’t fit under the bed in the back, so I paid my mechanic ~$150 to make rails to raise it by 1.5″ (it ended up being 2″). The welds were crude but held fine for the years I had that van. The woman who owned the shop said that technician was stoked for that job because it wasn’t another oil change.
Livability? Let’s see…
I did get the A/C working on my ’88 200SX this past weekend. It last worked around 2009. That has certainly improved livability in August in NC.
Years ago I did a little mod on the same car, the pre-OBD ECU features red and green LED’s to flash out the handful of trouble codes it’s capable of storing. But viewing these required one to pull the ECU from its home behind the kick panel in the driver’s footwell. A couple hours of wiring fun resulted in a pair of LED’s in the dashboard that would duplicate the ones on the ECU, allowing one to display the codes at any time, even while driving.
An FM transmitter and a Spotify “Car Thing” combined to create a near-flawless BT music streaming ability in the same ’88 Nissan while preserving the factory original tape deck.
First car was an 85 Pontiac 6000 with a bench seat, in 2003. I cut a rectangular hole in the middle of the bench to hold my iPod while connected via Aux cable to the head unit.
My first car was a ’73 Dodge Dart. I replaced the factory radio with a stereo complete with cassette deck! The actual livability modification was to fasten a 3-drawer cassette storage unit under the dashboard on the passenger side. A slight tilt up and a few self-adhesive hook-and-loop fasteners kept the drawers from flying open when I punched the 318 V8 in a race to the nearest gas station for a tank of leaded.
I handbuilt a big block for my ’76 K10. 400 horsepower isn’t a whole lot anymore, but torque is nice and anything is better than smog-era stuff with no compression. I learned that 11:1 on 87-octane is just fine if you fall into the right camshaft recipe.
I had a 2003 Infiniti G35 w/o the nav system. Where the nav system went, was instead, a decent little storage cubby with a lid that lifted up towards the windshield. I eventually got a Magellan GPS unit, but didn’t like the cord hanging down over the center stack. So I got a 12v car lighter/accessory receptacle and wired it into an accessory spot in the fuse box, ran the wire up into the storage cubby, and put the 12V plug in there. Then discovered that the Magellan fit perfectly between the front lip of the cubby lid and the front edge of the cubby. Almost looked OEM. When parked in a questionable area, a gently push flopped the GPS into the cubby, closed the lid and viola. No sign of an easy to steal GPS, back when they were actually worth something.
My 2005 Suburban leaves the 12 volt power socket on all the time (cigarette lighter plug for us aged folk) I grew tired of going out at night to turn off my dash cam after forgetting so I put a relay on the outlet to only power it with the ignition on.
On my daily driven 2006 300C, I used a scan tool to enable the fog lights to stay on when I use the high beams. It is much better on the dark desolate roads of the plains now.
My 2005 Cadillac has two slots for the power outlet fuse. 1 for switched and 1 for always on; you just move the fuse to a different slot. Maybe you should check that out for a 2005 GM; it may have the same fuse box lol. They were all parts-bin engineered back then.
I’m not going to look now….I dont want to know I did that work for nothing. haha
Im 6 Feet tall, and while I do fit in my NA Miata just well enough, I’ve done two things that have been huge. First is the usual “foamectomy” where you remove the foam along the center of the seat bottom, adds about an inch of headroom and for me. most importantly, means the top of my neck is no longer the thing contacting the headrest, so in the event of a crash I’ll be marginally less screwed.
The other thing is a 330mm Momo steering wheel, while it DOES look much better and give better steering feel via being smaller, my left hand no longer gets stuck on my knee when turning left, which is obviously a great improvement.