Car modification fashions, like all fashions, appear especially odd to those people who aren’t fashionable. I am very old-fashioned, out-of-fashion, fashion illiterate, unfashionable – call it what you will. That’s especially the case with car modification fashions to be found in Sydney.

Take the car I saw today in traffic. It epitomised all that is wrong with the city’s modification fashion. A Kia Rio, it featured dual polished cannon mufflers hanging low at the back, ho-hum alloy wheels, and a huge dual-plane aluminium wing complete with endplates. So, a pedestrian car with ineffective mods.

But that wasn’t all – nope, with just those changes, the owner wouldn’t have been quite at the fashion cutting edge.

It was also imperative that they position their rear ‘P’ plate three-quarters behind the numberplate – and of course that numberplate had to bear a series of purpose-picked letters and numbers showing something fundamentally meaningless. I forget what the actual plate was – something like ‘2EZ4ME’. Don’t get it? I assume it means “too easy for me”. What’s the significance of that? God knows. Of course, within his peer group, this plate probably makes him a hero.

Sydney is Australia’s largest city and perhaps as a result, has a distinctively different car culture to the rest of the continent. For example, in addition to odd cars like ‘2EZ4ME’, the most elaborate show cars in Australia can be found in Sydney. The desire for peer approbation also appears huge. Put those things together and you can end up with what I can only call very strange cars.

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