That FP post about Australians impounding improperly lifted trucks made me think about something again. Police seem to have a hate boner for modified cars, yet all manner of lifted trucks never get ticketed. I know for a fact that there were strict rules in Colorado about vehicle lifts, that so far as I could see were never enforced. Now I’m wondering if it has to do with profiling.
Do police not care about brodozers because they’re usually driven by white bros, and redneck wannabes? Lifted jeeps because 90% of the time it’s white guy driving? But within the tuner realm, there are certain styles of car that are decidedly not “white” or at least, even if it is a white boy he’ll surely be some stuck up city kid, and not a “good ol’ boy” from the country who deserves a pass.
I wonder because when I lived in Colorado, I would say about 90% of the lifted vehicles there did not meet the requirements that were in the vehicle code, and I never saw or heard of anybody getting ticketed for violations. On the other hand, tuner cars were always cop magnets. I only heard of one third-hand story about somebody being ticketed for their lift, and they had been pulled over for something else, and the cop was scanning the code to see what he could get them for while he was there. I have always wondered why lifted vehicles seemed invisible to cops who generally always seemed to spot an illegal ground effect light or some other much less dangerous, trivial nonsense, - perhaps this is part of it.