Pimp My Vacation: Custom Cars Rumble into Las Vegas

Posted on September 8, 2008

Video and Story: Russ Johnson

I have never really been a car buff. My several midlife crises have not involved hot cars, hot babes and certainly had nothing to do with buffing up at a gym. But last fall I admit to having a ball at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. SEMA is the acronym for the accurate but unsexy moniker of the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association, representing the makers of everything from chrome wheels to fuzzy dice, the stuff auto buffs use to pimp out their cars. The show, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is not open to the public: I got in as press, covering in-car gadgetry like global positioning systems and entertainment centers. But the public is free to wander about outside among the pencil thin, low slung racers, vintage Chevys with iridescent paint jobs and even a 1930s-style jalopy purposefully made up to look like an abandoned rust bucket.

Some of these cars are truly works of art. But as in art, there are the cliches, too, the Thomas Kincaids of the auto world. I have always rolled my eyes over the paint motif of flames spurting from doors and hood, usually two flames pouring over a dark core, like sides of a salmon steak. Reverse the image and it looks like swimming sperm cells. The fact that only one in ten million sperms cells ever gets anywhere sort of belies the flames. But then I read too much into this. Maybe I should get out a spray can and do something about my rusty old truck, perhaps the only one in the world without cup holders.

SEMA SHOW: Las Vegas, NV, November 4-7, 2008