Cars and trucks have become enormously expensive in the last decade or so. So much so, you can scroll social media for maybe half a second and find about a trillion videos of folks talking about how their car payments are over $1,000 a month. And scroll a bit further, and you'll find that a large percentage of car owners in America are now underwater on their insanely priced vehicles, so much so that many have compared it to the financial crisis of 2008.
For the truck world especially, this has led to the rise of side-by-sides replacing work vehicles, something I've written at nauseum about in the last two years. They're cheaper than new trucks, can do more, and won't break the bank when you inevitably break or scratch them doing what you need to do. Yet, while the utility side-by-side has pretty much replaced the work truck, the same can't be said about the go-fast side-by-sides replacing sports and fun cars for the general populace.
Side-by-sides aren't seen in the same way as the Mazda Miata, Toyota GR86, or Chevrolet Corvette by the vast majority of automotive enthusiasts, even though they're now the reasonably priced enthusiast machines. No, seriously, they are. Modifications aren't super expensive, changes are pretty easy, and the amount of fun and joy you get out of them, for me, surpasses anything I ever had when driving my own Scion FR-S or Volkswagen Golf R back in the day.
