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My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

zocalopublicsquare.org

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Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#331

Post by swasheck »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #223
EvanAnderson wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point my wife's 1995 Civic had a busted exhaust pipe ahead of the muffler and was loud as hell. She reported receiving compliments from a few different Civic enthusiasts, much to her confusion. She just wanted me to fix the broken pipe. In our family we use the expression "farting Honda" (or Toyota, Subaru, whatever) when we hear these kinds of cars on the road.

The exhaust on my old Range Rover split between the catastrophic converters and the first silencer, leaving it completely open. The novelty of it sounding like the start of Jerry Was A Racecar Driver hadn't entirely worn off before I welded it up, I guess, but I'm not about to go around attracting attention to myself. Not when I could see it making plate glass shop windows vibrate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkE…

catastrophic converter is such a hilarious autocorrect.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#332

Post by frollogaston »

Makeitmakesense wrote: post #294

Ok if anyone does find this comment, its as simple as this 1 - Manual race tuned cars are all about mechanical engagement for the driver. The engine sound is almost a requirement so you can shift without having to look at the tach. 2 - Modding cars for more noise or looks is a preference thing and in some cases can be annoying and even law breaking. We live in a chaotic world 3 - EVs are faster but do no offer the sa…

Unmodded GR Corolla will be plenty loud enough to gauge the RPM anywhere close to the redline. Or get a shift light?

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#333

Post by thepaultran »

nonameiguess wrote: post #318
thepaultran wrote: post #306

Hi everyone, I am the author of this Corolla essay. My friend who works in the tech industry told me it was posted here. Thank you for reading it! I never expected a silly essay about a Toyota Corolla would gain this much traction, but it is what it is. It also made the LA Times, but in an abridged version. Here's the link: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-06-22/fast-furiou... I'm not sure if this is going…

This is a bad place for content like this, unfortunately. Hacker News is extremely hostile to car culture, suburbs, California and the US in general. I don't really drive any more due to working from home and spine injuries in my 30s that made it difficult to sit in a confined space for more than 20 minutes, and I wasn't really into modding even back in the day, but as another not Asian but also not white 80s kid fro…

Thanks, man. Yeah, I'm still wondering how it got to HN myself lol.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#334

Post by HDBaseT »

ryandrake wrote: post #208
pipe2devnull wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some exhausts can sound cool but at someone that lives near a road I don’t think people should subject other people to loud exhausts. Just because someone installed a subwoofer (depending on how the audio was before) doesn’t necessarily mean they are blasting it so loud it is bothering other people. Some cars have pretty horrible stock sound

I wish the car modders would adopt things like Active Sound Design (ASD) that some car manufactures are using to pipe vroom-vroom noises through the car's speaker system. It seems like the perfect compromise. The driver wants to hear his car's loud vroomvroom, and everyone else -doesn't- have to hear it.

These "technologies" are unbelievably "cringe" (for a lack of a better word).

Car enthusiasts want the sound to come from some mechanical aspect. They want the sound and smell of burning fuel, pushing pistons up and down at extreme speeds with hundreds of other rotating and spinning parts working in unison for a cool sound.

A speaker diaphragm moving up and down 20 to 100 times a second doesn't quite scratch that itch. A speaker can nearly "replicate" any sound, which takes the fun out of it.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#335

Post by frollogaston »

numpad0 wrote: post #269
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad the handling is shit. It's too heavy. This is why I kept my motorcycle for when I want to have fun on the road.

It feels odd that extremely few in Anglosphere is pointing that out. Tesla chassis design and handling tuning is apparently atrocious enough that many total amateur dads on car review sites have to mention it, in the Japanese sphere.

I hear it all the time in the US, and I'm not even around car enthusiasts that much. Idk, either way don't want a Tesla cause of the touch screen.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#336

Post by eweise »

I bought a Miata as my midlife crisis car (I'm 60 is that still midlife?). I have to say I didn't realize how much fun this car is. Its turned boring trips to the store into an experience. Cruising down the street with the top down feels really relaxing. Plus its just amazing in corners. I don't drive fast but now I don't slow down for corners. Its like a go kart. I know everyone is moving to hybrid and electric vehicles but having a stick shift sporty convertible is just way more fun.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#337

Post by buran77 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #286
wwweston wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at the point where I don’t just want ticketing and other enforcement on this front, I want yanked licenses for this after a warning, and I might even want it legal to shoot vehicles guilty of noise violations and their drivers with paintballs to mark them for further enforcement and shame. Smoking is the atmospheric equivalent of peeing in the pool; noise pollution is something between that and opting everyone in…

Sure, but as long as they're allowed to paintball you and sick draconian enforcement on you for whatever trivial things you do they deem to be slights against society. Like FFS, it's just fucking noise. It's a small minority of people. Can we just ignore them? There's so much bigger problems. Most people grow out of it after one car like that.

> It's a small minority of people

So are serial killers. A small minority of people can affect the lives and health of a lot more. A handful of people roaring through a neighborhood at night like this can mean nobody ever gets a proper night's sleep.

If someone plays with a laser in your eye, being told "it's just light, it's one guy, can you just ignore him, he'll grow out of it", won't be a consolation. You'll want him stopped.

> Most people grow out of it after one car like that.

Someone else grows into it.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#338

Post by mingus88 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #286
wwweston wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at the point where I don’t just want ticketing and other enforcement on this front, I want yanked licenses for this after a warning, and I might even want it legal to shoot vehicles guilty of noise violations and their drivers with paintballs to mark them for further enforcement and shame. Smoking is the atmospheric equivalent of peeing in the pool; noise pollution is something between that and opting everyone in…

Sure, but as long as they're allowed to paintball you and sick draconian enforcement on you for whatever trivial things you do they deem to be slights against society. Like FFS, it's just fucking noise. It's a small minority of people. Can we just ignore them? There's so much bigger problems. Most people grow out of it after one car like that.

If we could ignore them, this thread would not exist.

and I support extra legal measures against these people. They do it for the attention and they deserve the attention they will have coming to them.

In Seattle they had a guy in Belltown being a nuisance with a loud charger at all hours of the night in an urban setting. They knew who he was and he lived with his mom (lol). I never understood why the community didn’t deal with it when the police would not. Lack of enforcement is what leads to vigilantism.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#339

Post by dwaltrip »

ericyd wrote: post #293
brokenodo wrote: post #11

I love cars and driving them. But the modded Corolla/Civic/Accord/Camry (why) people have always driven me crazy because their mods often seem directed to inflicting their cars on everyone else, with loud exhaust, subwoofers, and (subjectively) garish cosmetics, rather than things that make it actually good to drive . I recognize this is judgmental and it's unhealthy to always be annoyed at these people on the road,…

I also dislike loud cars, but I've come to accept that the motivation of loud car owners is probably to gain kudos from other loud car lovers, rather than to inflict pain on us normies. One time I remember being on my bicycle and a kid car revved past me and another cyclist. In my head I though "what an asshole" but the cyclist next to me shouted "Sick!!!" I'm not really defending the loud noise, but I think it's use…

It's still incredibly immature and selfish, intentional or not.

I admire your empathy, though.

Re: My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

#340

Post by JuniperMesos »

bradlys wrote: post #279

> Forget Vin Diesel. Asian Americans Are the Heroes of Import Car Culture Jfc. We're posting this wokescold crap on HN. I say this as someone who is buying an Ariel Atom this weekend. I'm an enthusiast as much as anyone. Acting as if Asian (viet) Americans in SoCal were the only fucking people into Japanese cars is insanely retarded. Nearly no one in tech or on HN is viet compared to the massive Chinese population in…

What I think is more interesting is to look at the media outlet that published this article to begin with. According to https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/mission/

> Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Zócalo is a unit of ASU Media Enterprise. Over our 20-plus-year history, we have hosted more than 700 live public programs in cities across the U.S. and abroad, have featured more than 2,000 guest speakers and performers, and have published more than 3,500 established and aspiring writers. We work in partnership with cultural institutions, public agencies, and community organizations to develop, curate, and produce high-quality public programs, editorial work, and multi-year series that engage the public.

> As a unit of ASU Media Enterprise, our primary source of income is Arizona State University. Our work receives further funding through a combination of grants, programming sponsorships, and public support. Donations made to Zócalo are processed by ASU Foundation on behalf of the organization.

Maybe there are political changes that could be made that would affect Zocalo media's funding model - why are they getting the majority of their funding from Arizona State University? Is this something voters in Arizona might vote to stop funding, if it was made salient to them? What are the incentive systems behind the grants, programming sponsorships, and public support that ultimately lead to Ky-Phong Tran writing and publishing this article?

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