Thread: What is your definition of a Hot Rod?

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Real Hot Rods don't have fenders

in the song "HOT ROD LINCOLN", it was a plain old Model A ("the model A made it look like a pup") with a lincoln V8, with 4barrels, overdrive, duel exhaust, 411 rear end, and safety tubes. So I guess it looked like a normal Model A from the outside but was secretly made to be faster than expected from looking at it.
Maybe "hot rods" is a general term, with all others being sub-catagories.....just like whether it's free, cheap, your brother buys it for you, or your friend buys it for you, a beer's a beer....and if you make it yourself, it may just be even better!

but also...it was called "hot rod lincoln", refering to the fast engine and drive train....not hot rod ford or anything refering to what it was in. so a car made faster would be a hotrod, whereas putting on low profile tires and fuzzy dice or dingle-berries in the window or making it bounce like a low-rider wouldn't make it a hotrod, unless the drive-train was also modified. I think the key word would be speed or fast. (or the APPEARANCE" of "FAST"). you could have a hotrod motorcycle, car, truck, boat, gocart, motorized skateboard, or Segway, as long as it was FAST!...(or appeared to be)

I can't tell you for sure what is a hot rod, but I will know it when I see it.

Hot rod magazine has covered everything from ledsled customs to rail dragsters, v-drive boats to factory muscle-cars to street-rods to corvairs and 914's with v-8's shoehorned into the back..... They have promoted the stuffing of oversized v-8's into just about every known front engine/rwd vehicle under the sun. They have promoted the modification of trucks, panels, and even embraced the vans of the seventies. In all their photo-shoots, they put a "Hot Rod" plate on the front of the vehicle, so I guess the term hot rod covers a lot of different styles of cars....
To me, any v-8/rwd vehicle wearing more tire on the rear, slightly lowered in the front, and dual exhaust with a healthy sound is qualified to be generically referred to as a "Hot Rod"!!

Call it what you want, as long as you build it yourself.