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!
In the early 70s, our family car was dad’s 66 Bonneville convertible. We took a fair amount of road trips. He built a wooden bench to bridge the footwell from the backseat to the front seat back, and upholstered it with matching leather (he was a service manager, so he could get it cheap). It turned the backseat into a usable bed for two small kids, and mom and dad rode upfront. My memory may be incorrect, but I think for daytime driving it somehow was storable in the trunk if the top was up.
Eventually, he decided mom needed her own car and she got the Bonny. He bought a Grand Safari wagon, which would hold a 4×8 plywood sheet with the back seat down. That was luxe.
Actually, not much.
I’ve fitted bluetooth head units to both my cars (old-school single DIN sockets woo) just to allow me to stream music from my phone without fiddling about with adapters and wires etc.
Neither car has any useful cupholders though. I don’t notice it often, but when I do it irks me.
Does anybody have ideas for neatly adding cupholders to either an E36 coupe or a mk2 Renault Clio? The interiors of both don’t exactly have a surplus of space for additions like that.
I had an E36 Coupe. So handsome.
Anyway, my fix for cup holders is that I have a drink when I stop. I’m not sure why I take such a hard line in this when I’m more than happy to eat Jaffa cakes while driving, but there we are.
I recently did a 9 hour drive and my other half couldn’t understand why I’d put the drinks in the boot/trunk rather than inside the cabin.
Sorry this is of no help at all.
The G body Monte Carlo and El Camino (possibly all G bodies, I can only confirm those two) have a slide out ash tray at the bottom of the dash. I don’t smoke. Remove the ash tray and you’re left with a set of surprisingly beefy rails. Today’s aftermarket makes a two cup cupholder, wrapped in color matching vinyl, that slides right in place and is eminently more useful for me. Combined with the Bluetooth receiver/FM transmitter, that car is ready to road trip.
If we’re allowed to get crazy.
I’ve thought about improving my old Ranger by adding T-tops too often.
Just haven’t found a good donor vehicle yet I guess.
Someday?
How about something I *didn’t* do, that’s *still* a mod?
What I didn’t do: install a replacement map holder thing at the bottom of the driver side door card in my 1980s MB. My guess is the original wore itself loose of its tabs after rubbing on the driver’s leg constantly for 100k miles, and it was missing when I bought the car. The cabin is pretty tight so I never replaced it.
That’s my quality of life non-mod mod.
Heavy
We didn’t like that our Tesla didn’t have a proper instrument cluster so my wife and I wrote an app to turn an Android phone into an OLED instrument cluster. (CANdash)
Aftermarket cruise control! Nothing else i’ve done comes close.For some reason i can never relax if i’m watching the speedo.
I always have older cars so a kit was the only way i could do it. So far it’s been fitted to two cars and -12 years later- is just about to be transferred to my latest beater
I did this once. It crapped out after a couple of years, but while it worked it made road trips better.
Gosh pictures would be so great here
Agreed. I’d love to see some of these ideas.
Camaras didn’t exist when I did my best mod. Okay, maybe they did, but they sure weren’t as accessible at the time.
If you have a recent GM, you can get a feature turned on in the HVAC module (dealer style scan tool needed) called afterblow. It will run the HVAC fan a few times after you turn off the vehicle to dry our the inside coils to prevent that musty smell when you startup the car the next time.
I’d love to get this set up.
A couple of washers under the leading edge of the seat tracks have made the CX-5 (base model, no power seat) much more comfortable. You wouldn’t think 1/8″ would make that much difference, but it does.
The ’88 Crown Vic has hidden wipers, and the gap between the hood and the windshield ices fills up up with ice and snow in cold weather. A long length of pipe insulation goes in there when it’s going to snow, with a homemade REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT tag.
Retrofit brake auto hold into both my Audi’s. Insane they don’t come with this. Cool thing about newer cars is you can do all sorts of coding. My comfort/lane change signal is now 4 blinks instead of 3, adaptive cruise remembers my last distance setting, my taillights come on with my DRL’s, the IC shows the gear I’m in whether I’m in Drive or Sport mode, and I put my oil temp up on the HUD, plus some other things I’m sure I’ve forgotten.
I have never heard of this.Someone actually makes a kit for it? That outdoes my aftermarket cruise control!
You can get kits to retrofit all kinds of stuff from Kufatec (or cheaper on Aliexpress if you’re daring). For coding stuff I use VCDS or OBDeleven.
In the mid-90s I drove from Columbus to Chicago and back in my ’92 Civic CX 5-speed using a long, wood handled ice scraper as my cruise control. I had to fiddle with it when the terrain changed significantly, but my right foot got to rest for at least a third of the five hour trip.
I had to laugh.I too was desperate for relief,and once used a piece of string connected from the pedal to the window winder knob
My first car was a 1963 Mini 850 and immediately decided it needed a heater. After-market heaters were very basic in those days (late 80’s), but after mounting it to the centre of the firewall under the parcel shelf (Minis didn’t really have a dash), routing the water pipes through and connecting to the engine cooling system, wiring up the fan and mounting a switch, I was quite proud of myself as a 17yo 1st-time car owner (and a lot warmer in winter!)
Nothing fancy. Just the usual USB power adapter and CD player cell phone adapter. And a ScanGauge mounted on the dash because I like data on how the car is running.
As a company driver stuck in poverty spec company trucks, over the years I came up with a bunch of “custom” hacks. I’m a gimp with a weak right leg so in those days before cruise control I quickly decided that 2 throttle return springs was overkill, and got real good at left foot only driving too… Didn’t Fuller advertise that the Roadrunner was a “semi automatic”? Kenworth conventionals were ergonomic disaster areas, so I taped a door stop wedge to the throttle pedal so I could push it all the way to the floor, which thanks to the gutless L10 Cummins engine was SOP. Eventually got a set of portable hand controls that installed with just a couple wing nuts- Management saw that and promptly got cruise control installed on the truck!
Does your semi auto comment have to do with clutchless shifts? I only recently heard this was a thing on bigger trucks.
In case that’s confusing… i was told a lot of drivers just matched the throttle and popped it into another gear without clutch. And just to be clear,this is an entirely different thing to double declutching or how two speed axles are shifted.
Is someone have a laugh at my expense,lol?
Does a bluetooth dongle count? One of those thingies you plug into the lighter and the AUX so you can play music from your phone on your old-ass car? Oh and also a lighter-to-dual-USB plug to go with that.
I’ll do you one better. Two of my cars are so old not only do I not have AUX, I can’t even do the cassette adapter either. I had to buy the Bluetooth receiver/FM transmitter.
I did the same thing. Connecting a bluetooth dongle to aux made it way nicer to stream audio on road trips. The only downside is that I used a cheap bluetooth dongle, so if the stereo is on but nothing is streaming there’s a high-pitched interference whine that changes pitch with the engine RPM’s.
hold the fucking horses, you might just have explained that high pitched noise my car sometimes makes lol
Gonna unplug the damn dongle tomorrow and see if that fixes it
Update: god dammit it actually was the dongle! It’s inaudible at lower speeds but around ±100 kph it’d get noticeably loud. Also explains why it’d get louder when I’d turn up the high-beams.
This is hardly original, but I have a (full) roll of duct tape on the tunnel behind the handbrake in my 911 so that I have somewhere to put coffee cups, water bottles, etc.
Even though my dad’s second Suburban had a giant center console complete with cupholders, I still remember going to K-mart to pick out a plastic cup holder/trash receptacle/tissue holder (remember those special, tiny boxes of Kleenex?) in a matching color to put on the center hump. All four cupholders were often in use during a road trip.
Right now, I’m seriously thinking about modifying the cupholders in my ZJ. They’re definitely from a different era; nothing quite fits in them, so any bottles/cups end up tilting at precarious angles. I’m torn between trying some supposedly adjustable plastic/rubber inserts, or getting a fabricated metal extender that mounts over the center console.
My 87 Corvette has soda can size cup holders that, depending on how they are loaded, bark your knuckles when you shift 2-3. After a bunch of Amazon prime returns I found an insulated coffee cup that fits. When it’s your daily, these things matter. Courage my friend, your mug is out there.
My Crosstrek has long front windows, and the shame of a non-extending sunvisor. I get roasted on long east-west drives. The visor has an elastic band running vertically, so I cut the flap off a cardboard box about he size of the visor. Now i can slide it back to block the sun from the back half of the window!
The armrest also sits too low to comfortably rest while shifting. but it does extend forward a few inches and extends partly over the rearmost of two cupholders (I was spoiled in the past by my GTI that had several clicking height options as you lifted the armrest). So, the rear cupholder is now permanently devoted to an empty tall plastic water bottle which props the armrest to the perfect height, as it extends to just the right length to rest on the bottlecap.
Last one is not me, but a guy I have heard legends of — pilots are notoriously cheap. This guy’s A/C went out in his car, so he took some large flexible tubing, closed them in the back windows so they would scoop air into the car, and fed them into a cooler in the rear seat which he would fill with ice.
More livable? I literally live in my van, so…
Username checks out
Down by the river?
My late father would like to step into the chat…..
When I was three, we had an old police equipment wagon for the family. Bench seat, dark blue vinyl to grill your thighs up properly….and no place to put his Thermos on long trips.
We didn’t have a lot of that kind of stuff where we lived, and cupholders were in the future, so dad made a console out of 1/4 plywood and some thin sheet metal. He painted it black to kind of go with the interior.
Then he busted out the coping saw , pluwood and glue, and made a little platform that hooked into the defroster vent and gave him a flat surface to put the Thermos mug on.
He came up with some pretty ingenious solutions over the years. I miss him a lot.
My grandfather stuck a slab of foam rubber between the seats and the center console on his 1963 Mercedes and every car that the family has purchased since then with a console between the front seats has had the same. Now we use a piece of that dark gray polyurethane foam pipe wrap insulation from the hardware store.
No more keys, change, glasses, cellphones, trash, receipts, utility bills and 10mm wrenches falling into the crack of doom.
A friend I frequently rode with had a habit of dropping his phone between the seat and console. So I stuffed a black gym sock in the crack when he wasn’t looking. Problem solved.
I duct taped a piece of cardboard over the hole in the floorboard so my feet wouldn’t get cold.
I had to disassemble the interior B pillar on both sides of my Jeep Panda 4×4 Trailhawk because the Italians saw fit to put a floating lock pin on the seatbelt height adjusters. Additional a sighting washer made of steel so thin it wouldn’t sit flat, so it would make a pinging sound as it move subtly on and out. It would make noise at random intervals on FLAT SMOOTH ROAD.
I JB welded the entire internals of both mechanisms so nothing could move and lost the tin foil thin washers on the retaining bolt. No operational or safety compromises to the engineering.
All this to say, the rattling and high metal ping were going to drive me clinically insane. I was halfway trying to figure out how to explain to my wife why I couldn’t drive my new car and have to lose $10k to swap so something even reasonably comparable due to the Pandi going on.
I can now appreciate the Italian mediocrity in it’s fullest, knowing I have probably the only example in Soviet Canuckistan without the seat belt rattle to taint the experience.
I cut a center pass-through in the rear seat back of my 2008 BMW 335xi to accommodate my budding cross-country ski hobby. Shortly after buying the car I started cross-country skiing regularly, my specific car did not come with folding rear seats nor the fancy BMW ski-bag pass-through thing, and my skis did not fit in the back seat without significant bending. The rear seat’s folding arm rest and trim piece hide the hole when not in-use, and transporting skis is no longer a problem (also works for modest lumber runs). I suppose a roof box would have also been a decent solution, but the cost for my effective solution was one Dremel cutting disk.
Haha! I have a home made center pass through in my car too (no fold down seats). It was one of those things I needed to do but was probably never gonna get around to. Then one day I locked my keys in my car when I stopped to pick up some delicious take out on the way home.
I was able to pop the trunk using my boot laces through the slightly cracked open window. Which really didn’t seem to get me anywhere. Then, because it was ‘one of those days’ and the smell of the butter chicken was getting to me, I climbed in the trunk and cut through the back seat with my pocket knife just enough so I could contortionist myself enough to reach the rear door lock.
Serendipity!
I’ve since cut the hole into a larger square and stapled the upholstery back, over an inserted frame of 1x4s.
A cube of polyurethane foam upholstered with the skins of the never used, view blocking rear head rests is stuffed in there. It’s functional. Not too noticeable really.
Besides, only the dogs ride back there, and now I can tote my fishing poles and other lengthy items around.
Sometimes it just takes a bad day to motivate yourself to accomplish a necessary project.