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cash, they get a personalized
vehicle that’s both unique and unmissable.
But what car fans can also get with their
customization is a slashed resale price, a target for thieves and giant fights
with insurance companies when it’s time to file a claim.
But what car fans can also get with their
customization is a slashed resale price, a target for thieves and giant fights
with insurance companies when it’s time to file a claim.
While many car hobbyists are aware of the
price of the latest accessories, few understand what their changes can do to
the price of their car or the cost of their insurance.
Boom Box Or Blue Book?
The biggest misconception about customizing
a car is that it automatically adds value. If you’ve spent several thousand
bucks installing a state-of-the-art sound system and making your engine roar
like a lion with a loudhailer, you might expect to be able to add those dollars
to the ticket price. After all, they cost you money and made your car better.
Well, they made the car better for you...
but not everyone wants to drive a car with extra-loud pipes and a stereo that’s
more powerful than their home theater system. In fact, the more you personalize
your car -- the more it becomes a reflection of you -- the harder it’s going to
be to sell it to someone else. Instead of receiving Blue Book value plus the
cost of customization, you’re more likely to get a fraction of what you paid
for the car.
Attracting Eyes... And Thieves
And that’s if everything you’ve installed
makes it as far as resale. One of the risks of building a car that attracts
eyes is that it can also attract thieves. Expensive music systems, built-in DVD
players, even the wheels themselves can be hot targets for roaming criminals.
Leave your customized car outside your house and you could wake up to broken
windows, bare wires and an axle on cinderblocks. And an insurance company that
doesn’t want to know because you didn’t tell them what your car contained.
Drop The Extras And Lower The Costs
Fortunately, there are a few things you can
do to lower your expenses. The easiest is to focus on customization techniques
that are easy to uninstall when it’s time to move on to another model.
Un-souping your engine might be difficult and expensive but uninstalling your
speaker system could be little more than an afternoon’s work, and cutting out
the underglow would just be a matter of playing with some plugs. In no time,
you’ll have restored the look of the car, and its resale value.
Similarly, unless you’re prepared to pay the
insurance company a small fortune every month, it’s a good idea to avoid
tune-ups that radically alter performance. Giving your Cortina the power of a
Corvette, for example, will give you a premium to match.
The bottom line is that accessorizing your car
might not be as much fun as increasing the acceleration but it can still give
you a serious-looking car for sensible cash.
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