Hot Rods What is a "real" hotrod?

We call them Hot Rods. The kids call them Tuner cars.
The only differance is 5 or 6 decades.
I don't know how to define it but I know it
when I see it!
Again, I'm going for a drive!

 

Or a bunch of blinking leds, looks like a UFO trying to land.....

 

I honestly think the term hot rod is open to different interpretation by many people,I might think the old school 40's style car is the quintessential hot rod where another guy feels that a period 60's build with huge tires on the rear,a blown small block and a 4 speed is the poster child of what a hot rod is.

Great thread Jim. HRP

 

Badass "hot rod"......bet its a handful like my 30 Coupe

 

Was talking about the Morris....IMHO a hot rod is anything 1940 and older....then there are Gassers which are a fringe.....then up from there is Muscle cars.....Pro Street etc

 

Real Hot Rod's are old looking, loud, have a hood prop stick, always need work and have spare parts and a tool bag in the trunk.

 

What is a "real" hotrod?
First off I didn't read all the comments. But---------------> If we gotta splain it to ya boy you wouldn't unnerstand!

 

If ya gotta lift the hood to see the "plant"....it aint a "HOTROD!!!! OH!!! and it MUST have a MAN pedal!!!!

 

So this ain't a hot rod?



And I'm not attacking you way of thinking, just trying to push the boundaries of what is a hot rod.

Man pedal all of them has (the right most), but the bad MoFo pedal is on the far left!!
The middle one is the female pedal.
The Germans claims, him who brakes is afraid.

 

I stand CORRECTED!!!!

 

There is only one rule....there are no rules.... a hotrod is whatever the builder thinks is a hotrod...

 

I always thought a hot rod was a car modified for performance. So in my wide definition there are tons of hot rods out there. Not that I like them and I would never have one but a kid today slapping a turbo on his Honda is the same as a kid from back in the day throwing a flattie v8 in whatever. Not but taste but that's how I see it.

 

Just what I was getting at...

 

Yes,your on something!
I still have an drive my 28A HOTROD,I built it 1959,but sorry 4speeds were so hard to get then,that it was an is a 3speed with a low $ Hrust Indy floor shifter. The rear trunk of my roadster was crashed in,so bad,as a kid I just cut it off an used the good part of body=its a bob-tail powered by a Ford"Y"block v8

 

Your car is defiantly a hot rod. It has 4 gears, just one of them
Is reverse[emoji6]. This thread has kinda opened my eyes to some hot rods that I wouldn't have thought of before. I like that!

 

NO! But that's okay. Just send them to the Boonies in Florida and I'll dispose of them.

 

Funny

 

and I burn rubber like crazy!

 

In my opinion, a hot rod is any classic collector car that has been modified to dramatically improve its performance. I think that everyone would agree that in "American Graffiti", John Milner's Deuce was a hotrod, but I think that Bob Falfa's '55 Chevy was also.

 

I'm not so sure I agree with the no hood rule.... This must be my street rod then.

 

This is actually a very interesting philosophical question.

I've long thought that there are two ways of seeing stuff (of course there are a lot of other ways but this is a useful distinction to make): one you might call nominalist; the other cultural-historical. The nominalist view has it that a type of thing, or species, is a name for a set of characteristics it has in common with other things of the same type. That is, "duck" is a convenient name for everything which looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. The cultural-historical view is more about the back-story, where a thing came from, who was talking to whom when it came about: if it didn't hatch out of a duck egg it can't really be a duck - though it can certainly be something imaginably duck-like (duckish? duckesque? duckoid?)

Both views are useful but to my mind some things work better under one theory and other things work better under the other. For instance, the nominalist view won't bring us very far when we're talking about musical genres. You can go on about rhythm patterns and chord structures all you want, but if it isn't palpable that it came out of a conscious engagement with a history and tradition of blues, it isn't blues. You can't do blues by accident (of course that brings up the old monkeys/typewriters/Hamlet thing - I'm not sure if it's really relevant to this. But the question of the possibility of monkeys happening to type out a play which might believably have been written by another, hitherto unknown Elizabethan playwright might be interesting or just someone trying to be contrary. But be that as it may.)

Point is, I believe a hot rod, in the sense we mean here, is that sort of thing. A car can be hot-rod-like, but in order to be a hot rod it needs to have been built in conscious awareness of and response to a hot-rod history and tradition, originating in the USA around the middle of the 20th century. Of course we can call any car a hot rod, but in a lot of cases we'd be using the term metaphorically, i.e. what we're really saying is that someone who has never heard of hot rods sticking an Ashok-Leyland diesel in a Hindustan Ambassador produces something comparable to a hot rod while not actually being one. Personally I find those metaphoric convergences very interesting: many don't.

 

BAM! Nailed it.

 

Using the US as a frame of reference, is the Ramchargers' first car, a 1949 Plymouth with its hemi V8 and huge, awkward ram-tuned manifolds a hot rod? It was certainly a racing car and an engineering mule, but I can't see any glimmer of hot rod history in it, unless I posit that it might be the progenitor of the factory-built hotrod. That's a bit of a stretch.

 

As long as we are trading opinions, Here's mine, A Hot Rod is a 29 roadster body on 32 rails OR a 32 Roadster, Both high boy style, these 2 combinations are the definition of a REAL Hot Rod IMO. Everything else is a Rod, Street Rod, Pro Street, Gasser, Resto Rod. Hot Rod history, the old school T's, A's, B's that people are recreating are very Kool, not for me, But, I have huge respect for the efforts involved and appreciate the results. Must say the quality and skills have improved a Ton, I'm old enough and remember what it was in the 60's, A lot of junk by today's standards, very few quality cars.

 

One can call or categorize his/her car but its what other people see in it that makes it a Hot Rod...or custom, or Gasser, or Street Rod, etc....Or maybe not..

 

Huh?

 

I have to disagree!!

 

And I have to agree with you!