(Please don't) Pimp my ride.

Every time I see a vehicle that has a lot of chrome and blacked out windows and other accouterments that indicate that it has been "pimped," I cringe. I feel as though there should be an immediate arrest for anyone who possesses that type of car. The cars should be seized and either destroyed or restored back to the manufacturer's specifications.

What motivates people to take an ordinary nondescript automobile such as a Honda Accord and lower it three inches, take the muffler out to make it extra irritating to other drivers and pedestrians and install a sound system that costs more than than their annual income?

It really bothers me when people take luxury sedans* - sedans once reserved for the wealthy - and put 22" spinners on it and get those really obnoxious tail lights (and of course black out the windows because the driver and his idiot passengers are obviously important people). Mercedes-Benzes no longer have cache anymore because too many classless buyers (lessees) take possession of these cars and absolutely destroy them. Do you think the engineers in Stuttgart, Germany envision a bunch of drug dealers and welfare cheats buying their meticulously engineered cars and ruining any grace and elegance it had? That's enough to make an entire company sick.

And are the dedicated folks at Bentley (which is owned by Volkswagen) and Rolls Royce (a BMW brand) painstakingly picking out the finest leathers and woods in the world and handcrafting each and every vehicle that rolls out of the assembly plant for the likes of...50 Cent?? Come on. Forty years ago, the idea of someone that uncouth owning (or even seeing) a Bentley or a Rolls was a blasphemy.

How do we stop this? The only way is with laws. Let's make this a top priority and rid America's highways and byways of these heinous rolling pieces of steel and aluminum. It must stop.

Cars you generally don't see all pimped out are Volkswagens (except for those idiot boy racer types with customized GTIs), Audis, Volvos and Saabs. All others are vulnerable.

So next time you plunk down sixty thousand of your hard-earned dollars on that BMW 550i, remember that there's a 19-year old high school dropout that has the same one, except his has bigger rims and a state-of-the-art sound system that will frighten elderly people and small children when the bass is turned up.


*Cadillacs are a lost cause at this point. The entire concept of the Escalade revolves around ghetto-tastic wannabe pimps.