Rims and Riding through Time
Looking at the history of the automobile, it seems like a remarkably short amount of time for something to have taken such a major hold in our imagination. They’ve changed the way we do things, certainly, and it’s even possible that they’ve changed the way we think. When large distances between points suddenly becomes smaller, and on a massive scale, we are confronted with the notion of seeing space and time in different ways. A vehicle is what gets you there, and for those who love the ride as much as the destination, then modifications become an important part of the car’s soul.
Most modifications begin, and also end, with rims and tires . These are the traditional bread and butter for most gearheads, marking the difference between decoration and serious modification. The first cars had wooden wheels and iron rims , and the brakes were nothing more than wooden blocks. It’s been a long evolution since those days, where the presence of the spinning rims at stoplights is now considered kind of a hallmark of someone who’s landed in style. Between then and now, however, most of the changes have been pushed forward because of low rider culture.
It is difficult to look at some cars and not imagine that they have a soul. The contemporary animism of automobile lovers inspires many of us to give our vehicles names, especially when it comes to our first car. It doesn’t take much of a stretch, then, to imagine how new rims for car tires might help to bring out our particular car’s personality. The first generation of low riders , however, didn’t conceive of the big rims we see today, because they had to be low to the ground to maintain a mean appearance, and to give it that edgy personality that is easily readable on the streets. Time and space may be more relative than we imagined, but we all move through the same streets, only some of us have a little more style than the others.
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