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!
The GR86/BRZ doesn’t have a good place to put the phone, so I built a felt lined pocket in the center console blank space under the HVAC with a USB extension inside. Looks OEM. No idea why they didn’t do such a thing from the factory (though it would be a little larger as mine is tailored to my specific, small phone). It also didn’t have lumbar support (that technology is just too advanced, even though my ’83 Subaru had it), so I added blood pressure cuffs between the springs and cushions. The adjustment bulb hides between the console and the seatbelt buckle and can’t be seen without looking for them.
It would be incredible if the OEMs could go back to a sensibly sized center console so that the overpriced massive land battleships they build didn’t have driver’s areas nearly as cramped as a subcompact so that people needed to sticking hackey looking pads on for comfort instead of stupid self-driving that doesn’t work and endless “safety” nags that might only help people who refuse to take responsibility as drivers.
Reminds me of the 80’s Dodge Daytona Z seats which also had little bulbs to pump up the sport seats. Good times.
My 1984 had that feature. It was the only thing that worked.
My 94 Beretta Z-26 had those too, I got asked a couple times if it was for NOS….
Disconnected the auto lock door feature when closing door. I dont remember how many times i forgot something after starting the car. I hop out to retrieve it without thinking close the door and boom autolock engine running keys inside. And it locked all doors. Hey lock when shiftibg into drice fine. But on door close NOOOOOO.
Cars do that now? Wow. I own older (but not ancient) stuff, and I think the locking at 5 mph thing they do is just fine, safety-wise.
It should be an option though. So many people buying the brand I work for are upset that we don’t have auto-lock
If I could, I would love to have some sort of dead pedal for my right foot. I do a fair amount of driving with the cruise control on, and my choices for foot placement are 1: hovering over the pedals until my shin muscles give out from lifting up my toes, or 2: putting my foot flat on the floor which feels like it compromises my reaction time in case I need to brake suddenly.
My 2010 VW Eos has ‘dead pedals’ both sides (but no cruise control!)
Wired the front map lights to come on with the dome light on my Legacy.
Got the single zone climate control panel to replace my dual zone panel in my Civic because it has a physical fan speed control (which is the passenger temp knob on the dual zone) and an A/C button.
Wider gas pedal on my Corolla for heel-toe.
The pop up locks in my Prizm had to go. They stuck up 3/4” when locked, right where I like to rest my arm.
I cut them off and riveted a short strap of leather to the lock mechanism as a replacement. They work, look decent (I dyed them gray) and no more plastic poking my arm.
I also cut some pieces of pipe insulation to size and stuffed them between the seats and center console to make retrieving dropped items easier. No more losing stuff to the void that required 9” fingers to get anything out.
I’ve yet to come up with an improved cup holder solution though I’ve tried a few. I need to work on that.
Color me impressed. It’s like the Geo version of those Porsche 911 club sport editions with pull straps for door handles.
Those are cool.
Just because it’s a shitbox doesn’t mean you can’t be obsessive about it. I did stop myself from stamping patterns into the tabs. It just seemed too luxurious.
The 2020 AWD Prius has the center arm rest at the right height, but the door arm rest is a couple inches too low. I made a covered pad to sit in that location with fabric straps to hold it in place. However this also covers up the finger hold in the door to close the door from the inside. I added a loop attached to the door card so I can grab the loop and close the door. Away from home for a week or so, otherwise I would link to a photo, but you get the idea.
In every car we own I installed a set of side-view convex mirrors on the lower inside corner of the side mirrors. When I drive a car without them, I feel the lack of visibility.
We need photos and gifs on this site badly
I put a decent stereo in a ’72 Super Beetle.
That model wasn’t built with a cigarette lighter socket, so I bought one from Radio Shack (early 1990s) and wired it into an accessory fuse. That gave me power for the Sony Discman.
The Discman headphone jack was the standard 1/8″ plug, so I got a patch cord (also at RS) to connect the headphone output to the red and white RCA inputs on the 40W/channel amplifier. The volume control on the Discman was the volume control for the car.
The amp was connected to an MTX truck speaker box that sat in the cargo space below the rear window. No front speakers, but that’s okay.
The amp sat in the glove compartment and the Discman sat on top of it. While driving, the compartment door remained open for access and airflow. While parked, the glove compartment door was shut for super-duper security. 🙂
It was the first car stereo I ever had that would adequately handle the cannons in the 1812 Overture. \m/
Nice!
Why does Radio Shack ask for your phone # when you buy batteries? Ha ha
I quickly tired of trying to retrieve my cell phone, credit card and other assorted crap that slipped/fell onto the floor through the abyss that exists between my car seat and the center console.
So I bought a set of these: Drop Stop – The Original Patented Car Seat Gap Filler
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BYH6C1E/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
(I have no affiliation with this product whatsoever)
A $2 stick of pipe insulation has the same effect.
Oh that marketing.. “No more fallen fries down the Carmuda triangle.”
It gives off strong ‘has this ever happened to you’ vibes.
No. Now leave them in the bag or get the hell out of my car with your fries.
On my 2012 JKU:
Beyond that, I’ve done numerous prophylactic mods and repairs. You have to be proactive in this automotive market.
On all of my cars, past and present, I’ve upsized the windshield wiper blade lengths for maximum sweep while not hitting either the windshield frame, or the two blades together. I live in the rainy North West Coastal region and the wet season is much more livable, and safer too.
(edited for punctuation)
I have to do the opposite. By going an inch shorter you achieve much higher performance in snow/sleet/ice conditions where the windshield won’t streak (as badly) due to slightly higher pressure across the blade rubber
I’ve been doing this since my first car. Shorter is better by far.
Go two or more inches shorter and you have wiper blades that don’t lift or chatter, even at very high speeds.
I added one of those drop-in center consoles in my ’72 Super Beetle probably 12 years ago, and gained two storage spaces and one cupholder. In the same car I installed a Retrosound radio. Looks great, but I didn’t opt for Bluetooth back in 2014 when I installed it, figuring that phones would always have aux output. Anyway, after years of shitty adapters I bought a little battery powered Bluetooth adapter that plugs into the aux port. Easy fix, and it even has a mic for Bluetooth calls!
I’ve had numerous people in large SUVs almost drive into my lowered Sportwagen…and continue almost driving into me, since the factory horn doesn’t seem to get their attention. A couple of Hella horns in place of the factory ones took care of that problem really quickly. Scares the crap outta people too busy texting when the traffic light turns green too.
A set of old Cadillac horns sound really nice compared to regular horns. I think they had like four or five simultaneous notes for sweet harmony.
This was a big part of why I sold my old mini. The top of my roof wasn’t visible to the stock-height yukon next to it. All the crash protection of a motorcycle with none of the power to get out of bad situations.
The armrest on the captain’s chair of my 2004 Sequoia flops down below horizontal. I tried to fix it properly but the metal frame of the seat is tweaked. So I got a wooden dowel rod and shoved it in between the center console and seat to keep the armrest at the level I want. Looks kinda ghetto admittedly, but I could paint it grey to match the interior.
If I had arm rests on a seat my mod would be to remove them. They feel so wrong to me. Yeah, you can fold them up but I just don’t like the things.
I put some magnetic tap lights under the dash in my old Super Beetle, just because it did seem pretty dark in there at night, though after awhile, I wasn’t sure why I thought they were necessary.
Also had a suicide knob on a Caravan company car for awhile, even with power steering, it still made it way easier to quickly and easily get out of spaces in tight downtown areas.
Found one of those plastic center consoles for the transmission hump of my ’84 Town Car, by then, those had become niche items no longer available in the full range of colors you could buy in the 80s and 90s, so I spray painted it blue to match and it looked pretty good in there.
Currently, I’ve got a foam rubber lower back cushion in my Hyundai, because my back was killing me at the end of the week otherwise. Had the same problem with a series of 3 Escapes assigned to me as company cars, almost feels like Hyundai and Ford are buying seats from the same place. Rock hard, no lower back support, short bottoms, no idea what either of them were thinking
A lot of seats are like that today. I don’t know what’s so damn hard about making a good seat—they used to know how! Instead of good seats we interact with every time we drive, we get loaded with electronic garbage of dubious value that few have asked for.
I’m generally the type to just do whatever I can to adapt to the situation rather than change things, partly out of laziness and partly because I don’t like being bothered so I just decide not to be bothered by things, so despite driving a somewhat fussy antique, I have barely modified anything. No A/C? No problem! I’ll roll the window down and enjoy the breeze. Window won’t roll down anymore? It’s a sixties car, I’ll use the vent window. Vent window still isn’t enough ventilation in traffic? I’ll bring along my handy-dandy electric fan and clip it to the sun visor. Or I’ll just sweat and deal with it.
I did get a modern radio for it though since I felt like splurging on something fun, I just haven’t gotten around to installing it yet since it’s a surprisingly maddening process to adapt a modern radio (even one designed for this specific car) to work in something that predates electronic memory and has the speakers grounded all wrong from the factory – and which I can find no information on what the wires for the radio actually do, so I don’t know what to plug in where.
I also put one of those cardboard fast food drink holders in the rear footwell since cupholders weren’t a thing in 1966 and I am
somewhatvery much addicted to coffee.The closest real thing to a convenience modification it has is an aluminum intake manifold (from factory it was cast-iron and heavy as hecc, I don’t wanna lift that) and a four-barrel Edelbrock carburetor with an automatic choke instead of the factory manual choke, which I actually wish it still had. The automatic choke can either be tuned so that it starts quickly but runs like crap when it’s warmed up, or doesn’t start quickly but runs well when warmed up. I have it somewhere in the middle at the moment, but nothing is really ideal, so I wish I could simply adjust the darn thing from inside the car since I know what the car needs better than a stupid coil spring.
Apologies if I missed it earlier, but what car is this?? You sound very much like my kinda guy…
David’s Uber driver has the exact solution to the problem I’ve had forever.
My knees don’t self-lubricate.
Ha! I own two Fords old enough that I bought the “smoker’s package” accessory soon after acquiring them…just to get the properly-sized covered cupholder ashtray to store coins for toll booth.
Those quarters have been sitting unused for years at this point!
Cash tray, not ash tray.
Though my favorite part is the little “smoking” icon on them…looks like a cigar. Such a time capsule to see a pro-smoking icon.
Back in the early 00s I inherited one of those Archos Jukebox MP3 players with a dead harddrive. I opened it up, soldered out the old 20GB drive and soldered in a new 40GB drive, replaced the factory firmware with Rockbox and made a custom mount for this in my truck using a bendable clamp light and some conduit clamps. It was mounted to the passenger side of the center console so that it was just to the right of the stick shift. The Rockbox mod also had a feature where it would pause the music when the power was cut so when I got back in my truck and turned the key it picked back up from where I left off.
Today’s combination of Android Auto and bluetooth is way more convenient but to be rolling around in ’04-05 with my entire MP3 collection made me feel like I was in the future.
Oh, and window tint! 1,001% improvement on these 100F+ days!
Archos made some really neat stuff. I had one of their portable DVR’s to watch recorded movies and shows on the airplane about 15 years ago I was making a lot of 4+ hour flights for work at the time. It was a pretty impressive piece of tech for 2005.
I added those little round spotter mirrors in the corners of my door mirrors on my work truck, being a 2500 with a bed topper any extra visibility is a plus. I really don’t know why they’re not standard, they’re great!
I actually prefer mirrors like that over blind spot monitoring tech. The mirrors never lie!
I love old but simple solutions to problems for their elegance.
I still marvel at the simplicity of the dual-position rearview mirror. Sure the now-standard autodimming ones are nice, but bang for the buck, the oldschool way rules and will never break. I mean unless the entire mirror comes off.
Right, even if the mirror breaks you can just see more angles at once. (Seriously, I have a side mirror with a vertical crack that I haven’t bothered to replace because it’s almost perfect)
I read in C&D about adjusting the door mirrors to cover the blind spots by default, adopted it across the family fleet and never looked back. Haha. Has the advantage also of with the inside mirror of giving between the three of them a full panoramic view of everything behind me.
Interesting, I may need to try that on my Mustang but on the work truck my inside mirror looks at the tools and stuff bouncing around inside the bed topper so it’s really more just for hanging my Bigfoot air freshener on.
OEM/Euro-spec aspheric side view mirror glass. Retained the heating, auto-dimming, and blind-spot-monitor light, and picked up a wider angle (and without the “objects in mirror” text, too). Highly recommended.
I made one of those middle-of-the-bench cup holder thingies for my truck out of scrap plywood. Made it to fit my coffee cup exactly, and it’s much more stable than the flimsy plastic ones.
I did the same for my Ranger. I even found wood stain that matches the interior pretty well.
Custom is always better than store bought.
I’ve got a ranger I ought to do this on. How’d you attach it to the bench?
I can’t speak for Mark, but I made mine with the rear board of the box extending about four inches below the bottom of the box. (like a capitol L flipped clockwise 90 degrees as the bottom) That extension wedges down in the crevice between the seat and seat back.
Easily removable and it doesn’t move around at all while driving.
None. It’s extremely livable as is.
I added one of those “fire missile” buttons that fits in the cigarette lighter plug. Humor goes a long way to make the commute more enjoyable.
Had my Lada in for an alignment once and I had some of those switches, the work order said ‘rocket launchers inoperable’
Mine says “eject” 😀
In my ‘96 GMC K1500 I swapped the driver seat for a powered and heated driver seat out of a ‘99 Cadillac Escalade I found in a junkyard. The stock seat frame was flimsy and tartly; the Caddy seat was easily 10 pounds heavier abd the frame was much more stout. Plus, the Cadillac headrest is a great conversation starter.
I added a touchscreen and a Raspberry Pi running Android Auto into my Volt when I had it. It worked really well and still routed the audio and phone calls through the Bluetooth in the car. Now you can just buy something like that (I bought a screen with wireless Android Auto and CarPlay for the car my kids drive.)
LOL, top picture. 6 stick pattern tattoo in a automatic car. Torch must be having fun with photochop
plus another LOL for the shift pattern
The Fast and the Spurious.
Annnd one for you 🙂
https://www.shiftinglanes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/fast-furious-gearbox-e1475016967326.png
I really thought you were going to post this one:
https://www.carthrottle.com/post/yCmJUh/
That’s a bad tattoo meme that makes the rounds.
Meaning it’s a bad tattoo, not that it’s a bad meme.
https://d2cdo4blch85n8.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Tattoo-of-H-gate-Stick-Shift-Went-Viral-for-the-Wrong-Reason-Featured-image.jpg
Surprisingly, I hadn’t see that one, but love the context.
Someone should get one with the Torch-ified erroneous ordinal numbering scheme.
A shift pattern tattoo and driving an auto isn’t an issue. I just want to see someone shifting in that pattern.