Custom Car Culture

Whether you call them Customs or Kustoms, these unique and unusual vehicles have carved out a colorful and fascinating niche in the hot rod arena since their roots in the 1940s. Today, they're more popular than ever, sculpted in a dizzying array of artistic and even eccentric designs. Whatever production car they started out as, most of them end up as low, long, and sleek shapes with "uninterrupted" lines.


True to their name, many customers avoid buying parts but instead create their own, often from salvage yard castoffs. Keeping the cost down is all part of the game. "The custom market continues to grow because the cars are easy, cheap and cool," says Tony Thacker of So-Cal Speed Shop in Pomona, California. "You can go out and buy '50s or '60s cars fairly inexpensively, especially if you want an oddball vehicle. A lot of customizing is bodywork, and there aren't a lot of accessories you can throw on a custom. The approach is to take off rather than put on parts."

To Each His Own
Yet customs by nature tend to defy rules and definitions, so what's a custom to one person may not be to another. The cars are essentially a personal artistic statement, as unique as the people who own them. Even the word "custom" reeks of individuality, so there are a lot of different segments to the market, from black-primer "rat rods" to six-figure show queens, and customizers simply do what looks good to them.


To experience a really intense distillation of this unusual form of car craftsmanship, every Memorial Day weekend customs flock to Paso Robles, California like the swallows to Capistrano. When it comes to West Coast customs, Paso Robles is the center of the universe. Held in the shady town-square of a quaint community located halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Paso show has developed into the premier place for a wondrous collection of some highly personalized rides. Hot-rodded engines are definitely part of the mix, but they take a back seat to trick paint jobs, wild bodywork, slammed suspensions, and tuck-and-roll interiors. This is the place to be stylin' and go cruisin.'


Rich Pichette of West Coast Kustoms is one of the founding fathers of this Technicolor gathering. "It's not a car show—more like a family reunion," he says. That's because it started out as a folksy club event in Los Angeles in 1981, and after bouncing around at several locations, it eventually secured a home in Paso.