Great Sound System, Crappy Car

Almost nothing annoys me more than to see a crappy car with a great-but-too-powerful sound system. (“Hey, what kind of tweeters and sub-woofers did you pack in to your scratched up ’92 Honda Civic? Awesome! By the way, your bumper just fell off.”) I say almost because one of the things that actually annoys me more than that is seeing a crappy old car with a crappy sound system trying to pretend that it’s a good sound system after someone read one of these car speaker reviews and decided buying the best one would improve on the car itself.

Here’s a perfect example: I was driving with my wife this afternoon to stop by a friend’s house. We stop at a red light and notice the rattle-filled thumping of a powerful subwoofer in an old car. We look around, but with the number of old cars around us, it was hard to tell where the sound was coming from.

“I bet you it’s that Oldsmobile,” I told my wife.

“No, I think it’s that Datsun over there,” she replied.

We couldn’t really identify where the almost omni-directional sound was coming from before the light turned green. About two blocks down, we hit another red light. We heard the thumping again, but this time there was no question. It was the Datsun.

That bears repeating: It was a Datsun.

A Datsun.

I can’t quite get over that. For those of you who might not know, Datsun was what Nissan used to be called before the company realized that the name sucked. At least Nissan sounds like it could be an anime samurai, or a Street Fighter II character. But Datsun…

That wasn’t the worst part. The car was a very dull red, like if it had been painted with spray paint, although the dents on the body signaled to a paint job by paint gun. Luckily, the dull red blended well with the rust eating the body, which in turn probably took a bit of attention away from the hand painted “Big Toyo” lettering on the tires. (I’m sure that the parents of the retarded seven year old who painted the tires were very proud of their child’s — uhm — work. Maybe they should’ve hung it on their fridge instead, or better yet around their necks, for all their friends to see. At least it wouldn’t look half as supid as it did on that car.) In addition, the car’s windows were tinted with that ugly, purple-ish window tint.

What got me was how the radio was installed. In the back seat of the hatchback we could see a big, subwoofer box, with someone sitting right in front of it, holding it down.

Let me repeat that: the subwoofer was a box sitting in the back seat with a passenger holding on to it.

So basically, a couple of stupid 17 year olds took their parents’ home stereo and hooked it up in their car. And the idiots didn’t even have the decency to play their own music! No, instead, they tune the radio to the local dance music station and blast that! How moronic can you get?!

Of course, this gave both of us a great laugh. I’m not against putting a good sound system in an old car. I’ve seen more than my share of sweet looking and sounding LeBarons and Oldsmobiles. But if you’re going to blast music for everyone to hear, do yourself a favor and at least do it in a car that looks decent. (Adding spinning rims to your ugly, rusting, smoke factory ’81 Datsun won’t make it look decent.) Otherwise, all people will be doing is getting annoyed with your crappy music — which, by the way, nobody is interested in hearing — and then laughing at the fact that your car rattles every time that subwoofer goes off.

On the bright side, they could have been driving a Yugo with spinning rims. But then they would just be asking to be chased down by a pack of flesh-eating goats.