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We’ve all heard the phrase “form over function.” It’s particularly relevant to car customization, because pretty much anything you can do to make a car look better is also impractical… some things, more so than others.
It’s almost too easy to make fun of bro-dozer trucks, rigs with towering-yet-fragile lift kits and comparatively small tires that destroy any usefulness these pickups and SUVs might have had. There’s probably a great academic journal article to be written about this trend of taking vehicles ostensibly designed for practicality and utility and turning them into useless show pieces that can’t even handle a bit of mud. Or, as it turns out, a normal left turn.
In this clip posted by Instagram user Dexter Goldwire Jr., one of these lifted trucks attempts to do one of the most basic things required of a vehicle… and fails. After a burnout, the bro-tastic Ford Super Duty turns left and then rolls over like a cartoon character that’s just slipped on a banana peel. The poster asks commenters what the driver did to flip the truck, and that’s honestly a good question considering how basic this maneuver was. Also unclear is whether the driver got out unharmed, but hopefully that was the case.
It may have just been physics, though. When you make the center of gravity that high by lifting a truck’s body to inadvisable heights, it’s naturally going to tilt when a lateral force is applied to it. This is why you don’t see many lifted trucks at racetracks, but usually a lift has a purpose. A lift kit can increase ground clearance, make room for larger tires, and allow for greater suspension travel. These are all important things for off-roading, but that’s not what trucks like this are built for.
This may just be the logical conclusion of form-over-function customization. Bro-dozers have now gotten so impractical and decadent that they can no longer be driven. And while things like this are a matter of taste, that makes it really hard to see the point of these trucks. Not when you can spend your money on a Ford E-Series dually pickup instead.
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Stephen has always been passionate about cars, and managed to turn that passion into a career as a freelance automotive journalist. When he’s not handling weekend coverage for The Drive, you can find him looking for a new book to read.
