Widebody Hyundai Ioniq 5 Reminds Us That Car Modding and EVs Can Coexist

What you're seeing here, boldly sprayed in salmon pink, is the Coga Body Kit that's been making the rounds since it was revealed at the Indonesian Modification Expo last week. This is basically the country's SEMA show, serving as the reveal stage for new concepts in automotive customization.

I haven't been able to find a price or shipping date yet, but I reached out to the Coga email address and will update if I get more info there. Meanwhile, translating some Instagram captions has informed me that this kit is planned for mass production (aftermarket production, not as a Hyundai factory product, just to be clear) and that it's fitted without damaging or cutting the car.

Oftentimes, installing a body kit this radical requires some sawing, so if all the pieces can be mounted cleanly, that'd be pretty nice. The kit itself is cut into separate components to match with the Ioniq's factory body lines, and retain essential functions like opening the doors and hood.

There's a neat (half-hour!) video about how the kit is made on YouTube. It's in Indonesian, but you can glean the gist by using closed captioning (CC button) and toggling Google's auto-translate function (gear icon) in your player. If you don't have time or energy to watch a video, here's an extremely expedited version of the journey, from a PR image of a stock Ioniq 5, to an in-progress shot, to the way the car looked at the IME show.

An outfit called Platinum Auto Workshop created the show car using paint from Belkote, a coating company that also hails from Indonesia. It's always extra cool when a shop actually sprays a car in such a wild color. Nowadays, stuff like this is often done with just a vinyl wrap. In the early 2000s, body kits and show cars were very popular in American tuning culture. Bumpers were easy to swap, and a lot of people took advantage of that, exchanging plastic for fiberglass and urethane pieces that made Civics and Integras look almost like super cars.

The trend faded into the 2010s as people started gravitating toward similar looks, and the folks who were still into style over substance started doing stance builds instead of major body mods.

I'm still not convinced we're going to see a complete EV takeover before society collapses into a Mad Max-ian hellscape. But if we do, I hope car customization culture survives, even if it's more about paint and body panel treatment than fine-tuning the propulsion process.

Source: TheDrive