Happy Halloween! Is it Halloween without a post about car-costumes? No, no it isn’t, because I’ve been doing goofball posts like this one for every Halloween for almost ten years now! It’s a tradition, a motherscratching Halloween tradition! So come on, everybody, and join us in the intense and intoxicatingly debauched revelry that is showing you the four most popular, influential, important, and most significant car-costumes of 2024, as picked by a panel of experts that may or may not include Nathan Lane, the ghost of Dr. Joyce Brothers, Pedro Pascal, and Jennifer Doudna, inventor of CRISPR-Cas9. Let’s see what they picked for this exciting year of our something 2024!
This has been an odd year, like so many recent years have been. I was happy to see that while three out of the four car-costumes picked seem to reference things that happened in this year, there is one throwback costume I was really excited to see, and one I’m sort of surprised we haven’t seen before.
Actually, let’s start with that one, the throwback, because I think it may be my favorite. Here it is modeled by the Autopian’s official car-costume model car, a 1984 Skoda Rapid:
Yes, look at that! It’s a car costume of the famous March 1983 Time magazine cover with a LeBaron woody convertible with Lee Iacocca’s face creepily smacked on the front! In automotive circles, especially 1980s-Mopar communities and K-Car fetish groups, this magazine cover has become something of a legend. Maybe it’s the incredible ’80s airbrush art, maybe it’s the delightfully weird Lee’s Head Stuck On A Car concept, but whatever it is, it’s fantastic.
This car-costume is mostly foam rubber, and the nostrils are open, allowing for at least some airflow to the radiator so you don’t have to worry that much about overheating, as long as you don’t idle it without moving for too long. Now you can drive around in Detroit’s Comeback Kid, who was actually a somewhat older man!
The car-costume companies can get their production together pretty quickly, as you can see here. It was only earlier this month that Tesla’s two-seater allegedly self-driving Cybercab was revealed, so the car-costume people had to work fast to get this one out the door. This costume consists of a full light-plastic shell that drops over your car, with cutouts for headlights and some limited vision, along with Cybercab-like full-wheel covers and a roof rack crammed with luggage and two of those “time out dolls” you still, somehow, see at car shows to this day.
The point here is that were you to try to get a whole family of four into one of these Cybercabs to get to the airport for your Disney vacation or whatever, you may have to strap your kids on the roof, which, really should be just fine.
I’m a bit conflicted about this one, as it feels a bit like just a crass leaping upon a cooling trend, but you can’t deny the impact the Hawk Tuah girl had in all of our lives, and I respect the use of the Studebaker Hawk as the front end. The TUAH license plate feels a bit of a lazy way to complete the joke, but TUAH is a hard concept to get across with automotive references. There’s not many recognizible cars named, officially, 2A, so I guess I can cut this one some slack.
The spring-mounted styrofoam Hawk Tuah Girl head is a nice touch, but the wig can get pretty gross in the rain.
In some ways, this is the only car-costume that really plays upon fear: the fear a Fisker Ocean owner must feel if they have even one thing go wrong with their $40 to $70,000 cars that now no longer have any sort of real, official service or support. The car could be great in most ways, but once that One Thing breaks, everything starts to feel different as you realize there may be no way to replace or repair whatever’s broken, and it could be the first of a chain of failures and then oh lord what have I done? Why have you forsaken me, O Fisker?
Any choice you make for your Halloween car-costume this year I’m sure will be a fantastic one. Have a fantastic Halloween, friends!
I’m gonna dress up my electric ranger as cybertruck, just need a few panels off the kitchen appliances:D
Who is this Hawk Tuah girl? How do you pronounce her last name? Why is she so popular?
Pretty boring. How about a huge Groucho Marx glasses and mustache and cigar?
I can deny the impact that whole thing has had on my life. I can deny it good.
That’s a better Hawk Tuah costume than any of the human ones I’ve seen.