Today is Halloween, that one day of the year where, unfairly, the practice of keeping razor blades nice and sharp by embedding them in apples comes under unfair scrutiny. It makes no sense to me. Halloween is about getting candy. An apple is completely safe from being eaten when surrounded by Twix and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and fun-sized Snickers bars. It’s absurd! But you know what isn’t absurd? This year’s fantastic crop of automotive costumes, known colloquially as “car-stumes” by those in the know. Did you realize that, according to the results of a study I’m currently imagining, this is the biggest year ever for people dressing their cars up in car-stumes?
According to the imaginary study from the University of New Plankton at Akron, which was peer-reviewed by 12 imaginary scientific journals, three out of every four cars in America will be dressed in car-stumes this year. That’s incredible, especially considering the practice was illegal as recently as 2012.
According to online polls hosted on most major pornography and/or cooking websites, there are four clear popularity leaders in car costumes this year: three for pretty much every car and one especially for Tesla Cybertruck owners, who seem to get very into disguising their cars with costumes. So, with that in mind, allow me to introduce you to 2025’s quartet of Most Popular Car-Stumes!
Unsurprisingly, this year’s best-selling car-stume features an officially-licensed Suzuki Carry Kei truck full-front mask and a large dagger with a banner reading TARIFFS on it. It’s not really a subtle costume, but the continuing nightmare of how expensive tariffs have made importing Kei cars and other cars into America has been on everyone’s mind. Sometimes, even Halloween costumes can become symbols of protest, and it looks like that’s what’s happening this year.
The Suzuki mask should be able to be repurposed into other car-stumes in the future, when all of this hopefully gets resolved.
It’s a little unusual to have a model-specific car-stume make it to the Top Four, but I think the combined popularity and overall cultural impact of these two things – the Tesla Cybertruck and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault make this car-stume an absolute winner.
The Cybertruck’s angled shape and steely gray color already make it look like the entrance section of the Svalbard Seed Vault, and the addition of the costume’s clever hood-and-windshield trademark Seed Vault front window/light panel will make this recognizable to anyone you pass by.
Sure, visibility suffers significantly, but isn’t FSD supposed to handle all that crap, anyway? Sure it is.
With America already having Svalbard Seed Vault-mania, everyone excited about the idea of ultra-long-term-cold-storage for over 1,300,000 seed samples to help recover after some kind of apocalypse, combined with that special Cybertruck je-ne-sais-quoi, this is a 100% car-stume winner.
A good car-stume should have its finger on the pulse of culture, and I think this winner absolutely has that! Yes, it’s the incredible 6-7 meme or trend or phrase or whatever the hell it is, which Dictionary.com picked as their Word of the Year, despite it not really being a word and no one really having a good handle on just what the hell it means.
But a good car-stume doesn’t have to know what anything means, it just has to know what things feel like, and right now it feels like if you strap a huge 6 and 7 to your car, it’ll have some sort of recognition and resonance to make someone, somewhere smile with a smug yet insecure sort of in-group recognition, and when in two years you look back at your car wearing this, you may very well have no idea whatsoever what the hell this was all about.
And that means you won. Probably.
You know what has been a huge topic this year? Artificial Intelligence. AI. It’s been everywhere, infiltrating every aspect of our lives, and it seems to be hell-bent on taking everyone’s job. Everyone is thinking about it, which makes it a great candidate for a car-stume! But how do you really get across the concept of “AI” in a car-stume? It’s not easy. That’s why the most popular way to jump onto the AI train for car-Halloween has been to find an AI data center, yank some AI server out of its rack, tie it to your bumper with some heavy cable or a tow strap, and then drag that unhelpful lump of silicon and metal down the road, watching it kick up rooster tails of sparks as it bounces and bangs along the asphalt until it finally breaks into pieces, littering the roadway with RAM modules and solid-state data storage devices and fans and ribbon cables and broken hunks of plastic.
Who’s taking jobs now, you smug art-stealing pile of bits? Who’s tough now, AI? Jackass.
Anyway, Happy Halloween! Be safe out there! Enjoy the debauchery!
Every time I think 6-7 is stupid, I remember the day The Great Cornholio made his appearance.
A diabolical plan was hatched
Rudimentary eyes were attached
Surveying what was about and within
Privacy, consumer protections, are a sin
Control is debatable, but rest assured
When things go south, the responsibility is yours
Offering the promise of added safety
Insurers say; What have you done for us lately?
The checks and balances are absent
Public beta testing continues sans consent
Lulling the inattentive, distracted, into bliss
The Zombie Apocalypse
I always thought of the Hummer H2 and H3 as a Blazer in a HMMWV costume. Like a kid dressed as their favorite superhero.
The 6/7 meme has amazing traction. I was watching a football game at a sports bar today, and all of us old farts were talking about it. Well, I wasn’t talking about it. I was just listening. My best take on it is that it’s kind of like when we more literate people would say “six of one, half a dozen of the other.” But what do I know.
I didn’t see any car-stumes this weekend. I see far more cars with red noses and antlers closer to Christmas. But that’s up here in the PNW. Other regions may vary.
Can we ask Otto what his take is on the 6-7 or six-seven? Might be good to get another generations take and I’m not asking my godchildren. Signed Gen Xer.
For Halloween I just open up the hood/bonnet of my black 2007 Lotus Europa.
It’s the in the shape of a bat.
6-7 is obviously the celebration of dual brake circuits becoming mandatory in 1967.
Having experienced a brake cylinder blow out on a single-circuit brake system, I am rather enthusiastic about that development.
And – as of this writing – we are only 5/6 of the way through the year.
Seems like a case of premature adulation.
I’m at sixes and sevens over this.
Speaking of Skoda costumes let us not forget a weird space in time:
https://www.skoda-virt.cz/cz/clanky/jine/4322-skoda-supersaloons-great-britain-1970s/
I still think you should have gone with my “Tariff-ier” idea, a kei truck in an Art the Clown mask.
I will rise to the bait, I wonder if this will lose someone a bet.
Kvasiny car! The 130 RS was quite the thing!
A splendid article on many levels, again.
https://www.secret-classics.com/en/skoda-130-rs/
Also a bit of fillum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZTC1OuCXRw&t=196s
Slow car fast stuff, OK fast car fast stuff also a very cool circuit.
I think the predominant carstume this Halloween, as on every other day of the year, will be tall-wagon-dressed-as-an-offroader. Just like the Elvira dress-and-wig sets, the toilet paper mummies, and the Power Rangers suits, no one mistakes it for the real thing, and no one even imagines it could be mistaken for the real thing.
I realized the day after Halloween last year that my neighbors new Lexus wasn’t wearing a costume, it’s fugly mask was a year round thing.
“ultra-long-term-cold-storage for over 1,300,000 seed samples to help recover after some kind of apocalypse”
Which kinda begs the question; just how long can those seeds stay viable? Could they survive a decades long nuclear winter? How about an Earth completely frozen over again for a hundred million years?
Decades, yes!
Hundred million years? No. If you are extremely lucky you might be able to extract some DNA from them assuming oxygen, and cosmic/terrestrial radiation haven’t shredded all the base pairs to bits.
I recall hearing a while ago DNA had a relatively short half life based on extraction from extinct bird bones:
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-life-dna/
They guesstimated 6.8M years was the limit even with ideal conditions. After that its just nucleotide soup.
Mmm – Dino Soup!
At that point it doesn’t matter if the DNA came from 500MYA dinosaur blood in amber, modern dinosaurs, mushrooms from the grocery store or synthesized from base elements in a lab. Regardless of the source is it’s going to make an equally delicious soup.
Pro tip: A shake of mono sodium glutamate salt makes it really pop!
Too bad, I was too optimistic. although the seed vault is even better than ideal conditions found in nature a half life of 7mil years would mean only. 006% of the DNA remains intact after 100 million years.
I think that also means life.probably originated on Earth, or at least within this solar.system after all. Between the time it would take, the radiation and the collisions I doubt any viable DNA could have survived the ride on a rock between the stars.
I mean we were able to extract DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber to make Dinosaurs – not once, not twice, but seven times!
Those dinosaurs were mostly frogs.
CGI frogs at that.
I will enjoy the debauchery this year, my dear friend Torch. Debauchery is the sole reason I wear a costume. Well, a different costume than I normally wear
Let me guess: A Lizardman in a human suit wearing a lizardman suit?
Too on the nose. I prefer pretty princess.
Well yeah. Everyone knows pretty princesses are the delicious treats preferred by lizardmen.
And dragons.
Eaten by a dragon? Yes, please.
Halloween is the day that people compliment me on my costume, when I am dressed the same as the rest of the year.