As paths of car ownership pile on the years, a certain level of maturity in respect to modification is often achieved. For instance, coilovers may be an easy way of dialing in ride height, but don’t expect cheap units to ride well. However, that doesn’t mean vehicles can’t be improved. For lifelong tinkerers, there’s always something to do, something to optimize, something to tweak. Today we’re asking about the modifications on your must-do list, or the minor annoyances you’d wish to improve on.
I’ll give you an example. While I wouldn’t really want to change anything about my Boxster, I can tell you right away what I would change about BMW 325i — I would give it a limited-slip differential.
Before my 325i, I had a 2004 Infiniti G35 sedan with the six-speed manual transmission, notable because 2004 was the year the viscous limited-slip differential came to the manual sedans. Now, viscous limited-slip differentials are inherently flawed because spirited use can overheat the special silicone fluid inside, leading to a substantial loss in effectiveness. However, a viscous limited-slip differential still beats the brakes off of an open differential when it comes to regulating wheel speed differences.
Although my 325i is brilliant to drive, there are conditions in which a limited-slip differential would be nice. A helical unit wouldn’t sacrifice everyday manners in pursuit of performance optimization, and it would be a relatively easy thing to install. So yeah, that’s one thing I’d change about my car. What would you change about yours? Perhaps there’s a modification you’re craving, or a factory option you feel you’re missing. Whatever the case, I’d love to hear about it.
(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal)
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
How Many Different Models Of Car Are There?
-
What Four-Door Car Should Have Been A Two-Door And What Two-Door Should Have Been A Four-Door?
-
What’s The Weirdest Thing About Your Car?
Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage.
Less rust, preferably not achieved via the standard mechanism of replacement by holes.
I wish I could grab the ass on my Mazda3 hatch and pull it back 10 inches and up 6 inches at the hinges. Basically I want a Mazda3 wagon. I love the car, but sometimes I can’t fit as much stuff back there as I would like.
At first glance of your comment, I was envisioning Ray Wert behind a Corvette.
Current car – Buick Enclave, although honestly, most could use this same modification:
The B pillar takes up space where I would like my shoulder to be. I am 6′-2″, and have very broad shoulders, so most cars begin to get narrower at a height where I am still getting wider. That means I have to lean to the middle of most cars.
It’s inconvenient, and uncomfortable. The only vehicles that don’t do it are full size trucks and truck-based SUV’s. If I could widen the roof and straighten the B pillars and on back, I absolutely 100% would.
This is a great one. I have long legs, and my Ford Focus basically requires me to lean my right knee up against the center console. I don’t notice it around town, but on long drives, totally.
Like, a thing I could change? It wouldn’t be easy at all (I’m not too competent honestly), but it’d probably be to add the flip down liftgate speakers for my Compass. I think that’d be sweet to have, it was a factory option all the way until 2017!
If it was anything I could do with a wave of a real-life magic wand, it’d be to change the freaking transmission to a 7 speed. I like low first gears as much as the next guy, but I also love when I can cruse at 70mph at max like 2,000rpm to get some pretty good fuel economy. Cruising at 2,300rpm or so seems high to me as is (yet there’s compact/subcompact cars that cruse at a higher rpm and still get better mpg!), but that may just be an odd quirk of mine, I think.
1997 Del Sol VTEC – more torque, and gearing to take advantage of it. 160 HP is generally sufficient to have fun with (driving a slow car fast) in a car this size and weight, but living at the top of a mountain pass I would really appreciate being able to drive up the hill without having to spin at 5000 RPM to keep up with traffic. Being able to do 80 at 3000 RPM or less would make road trips a lot more comfortable as well.
A 160hp Del Sol isn’t a slow car. Most Del Sols came from the factory with half that.
You want to drive your Honda at low rpm? You realize VTEC only works with short gearing?
It kind of sounds like you want an Accord. My two F-series Accords pull decently well from 1500rpm.
I understand perfectly well how VTEC works; the fact remains that 111 lb. ft. of torque is not enough to maintain 80 MPH up a 6 percent mountain pass, and that the drone from 4000+ RPM is a lot when driving at freeway speeds for more than an hour. As such, I would change these characteristics (maybe add 20 lb. ft. of tq. and a 6th gear?), but retain the sporty-ish high revving two seat convertible form factor that I otherwise enjoy.
I think you missed the purpose of this article.
4000+ rpm driving at freeway speeds? Does a Del Sol have grossly different gearing from a Civic? That sounds like my 1974 Jeep.
.848 5th gear with a 4.4 final drive in a 97 Del Sol VTEC vs. .702 and a 3.7 in a 97 Civic EX. Super high strung.
And to clarify my earlier statement, 111 lb ft of torque isn’t enough to maintain 80 up a 6% pass in 5th gear, requiring the downshift to 4th, which puts you at ~5400-5500 RPM (just below the VTEC threshold)
2020 Honda Fit 6MT. Sixth gear is the same OTGR as 5th in prior-generation Fits, 4th is only useful for long uphill stretches on the interstate, 5th is useless and I shift 1-2-3-6 around town all the time.
It seems to have been a lost opportunity not to have kept 5th at the prior models’ OTGR and give it a really long-legged cruising gear rather than a 6th that’s so strictly for the spec sheet.
OK I answered already but I thought of an even more minor thing with the CR-Z automatic: the shift knob. It’s this massive, jet fighter joystick thing that certainly makes an event out of shifting, but it’s only a PRND, so you almost never have to touch it again, as other shifting can be done with the paddles. Still, it takes up a ton of space and pushes the cupholders far forward to make them far less useful. I’d much rather have flush buttons or something.
It dings at 4C to tell you it’s cold and that is the most infuriating feature.
YES – and while it has a good reason to, it doesn’t tell you why you should care. Also the chime is so much more of an “emergency” tone than “hey, just a heads up”
That’s the point where bridges may start freezing over.
I understand that the warning exists for a reason, but I had to look it up to find out what that was. For the loudness and severity of the warning, the car doesn’t actually tell you “hey, it’s cold enough black ice can form” or “drive carefully, bridges might be frozen”. All it does it “BING!!! It is 39 F outside”, leaving the average driver left wondering: so what?
The purveyors of the Ultimate Driving Machine expect the Ultimate Drivers to do their due diligence and read the Ultimate Driving Machine’s Manual.
Should they? Yes. But especially for something that sounds so critical, the OEM doesn’t have to be so obtuse about it. Plus, what if you don’t have your manual to look it up?
Oh my god I was just hating this very thing last night. The Z4 does it, and thankfully the bike doesn’t have a way to ding but the blue flashing snowflake animation is an unnecessary distraction when I’m clearly riding in that temperature on a goddamn motorcycle. You’re allowed one (1) non-emergency ding per drive cycle, and ideally not even that.
I didn’t use to care either way about this, but I’m starting to get bugged by it. Especially because the other day the ambient temp fluctuated just slightly enough on my drive that it dinged at me twice in one drive.
The microwave oven digit temp readout in the rearview mirror of my family’s Saturn VUE would at least say ICE, that’s more meaningful than “it’s cold!”
5th gen Toyota 4RUNNER:
1) The 4.0 makes terrible low-end torque.
2) The 5-speed auto trans is not happy with this engine…it should be an 8 speed
3) Fitting even a 33″ tire (approx. 1″ larger than stock) often requires trimming the body mount and inner wheel well.
Realized the title says ONE thing. My one thing would be that this would have come with the 5.7L V8 from the factory.
I have a 2016 Jeep Wrangler, but the radio in it
isfeels about ten years older as far as technology goes. I don’t expect it to be as slick as an iPhone, but it seems like it was developed before the JKs came out in 2007, and they didn’t make any changes to it for the entire run of the JK series. The JLs came out in 2017, and assume the head unit was much better… it is an almost daily disappointment.I would give my left thumb for a telescoping steering column on my JKU. The JL and JT has this feature, but it’s pretty tough to justify buying a new vehicle to get a new feature, no matter how important it is to me. Unfortunately, there’s no reasonable way to install one either, so it’s one of the very few things you can’t retrofit onto a JK. Which is really too bad, because, as a tall person, it does make the interior ergonomics a lot worse overall.
My BRZ desperately needs a hatch back. It already has the profile and the hatch would maximize the utility of what limited trunk/rear seat space it has.
It also needs a turbo and t-tops but above all I want a rear hatch.
For basically any unibody car I’ve ever wanted and or had: Recovery points strong enough to handle a tug from a recovery rope.
For every car: Absolute minimum electrical crap. I’d rather have to manually crank my engine over than rely on a battery to get it going.
“For every car: Absolute minimum electrical crap. I’d rather have to manually crank my engine over than rely on a battery to get it going.”
Having owned exactly that (a TR-3) I can assure you, no you do not want this. Hand cranking on a regular basis is a good way to break something you don’t want broken. Usually it’s your hand but it can be something worse. Cars literally killing their human starters is why electric starters were invented.
(High displacement, high compression engines might make hand cranking impossible anyway. It was hard enough cranking over the TR’s 2L I4 with 9:1 compression engine.)
Also unless you LIKE waiting for tow trucks in the rain you’re going to want electronic ignition. Upgrading to electronic ignition helped my TR’s reliability quite a bit.
The rest is up to you though.
Never had any issues starting on the kick start bikes I had except for a Honda Z-50.
Dead batteries on the other hand? I’ve had more than I can count, and with that I’ve had way more electrical gremlins than I’ve ever had mechanical ones.
OK. You might want to stick to motorcycles, otherwise its your funeral. Literally.
There are other options like spring starters, air starters, etc. I’d rather deal with any of them than a battery powered electric starter.
IIRC some newer Mazdas fire a charge in the most optimally positioned cylinder to start the engine.
Now that’s cool! Know any of them off the top of your head?
This is what I found:
“Mazda tried to complicate things in 2008 when it teased engine geeks with its theoretical Smart Idle Stop System (SISS), which attempted the operation without relying on the starter motor. SISS would have manipulated the alternator load to stop all four pistons exactly halfway through their stroke. To restart, the cylinder in its compression stroke would get a small squirt of fuel that, when burned, would spin the internals backward just enough to produce compression in the neighboring cylinder. That cylinder would then receive a normal supply of fuel, and its Âcombustion would spin the crank in the proper direction. Unfortunately, this elegant idea never materialized, and Mazda went the more traditional route with its i-stop, available on 2.0-liter gasoline ÂMazdas in Japan and Europe. The i-stop system, though, does use an initial combustion blast to aid firing, easing starter stress and reducing the restart time by half, to a claimed 0.35 second.”
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15126526/engine-stop-start-technology/
That’s a shame
Look at it this way. Its a start.
MG: I’d like to do something about the heat in the footwells. It’s the biggest complaint any MGB GT owner has about the car; those footwells just trap heat. It’s OK with the vent open when you’re moving, but sitting in traffic in the summer is miserable.
Truck: It’d be awesome if the transmission synchros and the worn-out shift linkage would just magically regenerate, so I didn’t have to go to the trouble of rebuilding them, which I’ll have to do eventually.
Chrysler: I wish I could turn off that stupid wind-chime startup/shutdown noise. I’ve finally resigned myself to it, but I wouldn’t be unhappy if it went away.
Lets run the list-
2017 accord V6 sedan: manual transmission. Its bogus that it only could be had in 06-07.
2002 mustang- i wish it was a convertible.
1988 comanche- 4×4 please.
1969 chevelle- 5 or 6 speed manual
2021 gladiator- make it a 4xe. Could fit bigger battery pack in this!
As an ’02 Mustang owner myself, hey, the coupe is handsome (esp from the rear and sooo much visibility compared with current stuff) and it’s one less thing to have to worry about replacing at least!
I do agree there! I wish it was a convertible, but I wont sell it- it was my first car, so it has a special place.
Sweet! And I’ve owned mine from new and will keep her for the rest of my life.
I wish my 2013 SHO didn’t feel like it might break something if I floor it.
2014 Skoda Octavia wagon owner here. There’s one thing that I REALLY dont like for no real reason about my daily driver and it is the fact that the central locking unlock ALL DOORS when I take the key out of the ignition. It’s useless and it makes me cringe when I’m in a busy city center
Having little kids, the ability to lock out the rear door handles, window switches, and climate controls is great. But I wish a car company would also add the ability to lock out the rear dome/map lights. I get horse yelling at my kids to turn off the map lights when we’re driving at night.
I would probably like my Voyager to have the powertrain swapped with a Sienna.
I wish any of my 4 *checks notes* 5 cars were drive able in any way…
I’ve found it’s more comforting not to keep notes.
Add a Turbo. The motor cannot have one added by design.
I’d like a set of Tiburon GT wheels for my Tiburon…. they just look so much better
Honda CR-Z: I don’t need any more power, but I’d drop the CVT for a real auto transmission. For all the sound deadening it gains over its stablemate Fit, the CR-Z’s CVT sounds horrible, especially under hard acceleration or engine braking.
I know it came with a manual, but I don’t want one. I just want a weird looking commuter.
I wish my Triumph spitfire was 20-30% larger, while still being a spitfire. I’m 6’3” and 275 Lbs., I can fit but it isn’t very comfortable after a while, and my head is above the windshield line. The next size up is the Triumph Stag, which is famous for being disastrously mechanically unreliable, and a much less attractive design in my opinion.
The front seats/seating position in my Chevy Bolt, I already added padding so the ride isn’t as harsh as it was, but the width of them in general, I’m a fairly big guy, and they just don’t feel like I fit “in” the seat, more like I’m sitting “on” the seat if that makes sense.
Also I’d like the steering wheel to be a bit higher, the car sits more upright but I have the seat and steering wheel as low as they can go(again tall guy), I have plenty of headroom but the steering wheel is still not in a good spot, I like a car where I can just rest my hand on the top of the wheel comfortably but not able to on the Bolt, and as far back as I sit for legroom, with the steering wheel as far back to match, the infotainment leans forward so to use the touchscreen is a stretch. As much as I wasn’t a fan of the “we taped an ipad to the dash” look, I think an upright screen would’ve worked so much better.
Also it’s white, but I could get it wrapped if really wanted.
It was a bit of a gotta have a car purchase, and wanted an EV with decent range, in my budget, and that narrows the choices down to Bolt. I sat in a Kona after and was like dang, this should’ve been it, though I don’t like the shift buttons on those, also not sure on their styling. 30 years on and I’m still figuring out how to buy a car I really like and am comfortable in.