The Car as a Light Show

The luminous Nissan was among a dozen or so vehicles assembled for the Glow-Off, an automobile lighting competition held in conjunction with the New York auto show last month. Some of the cars throbbed with strobe lights and glowed with neon tubes. Some seemed to hover, ''Close Encounters'' style, above pools of light. Illuminated cars are the latest thing in car customization, successors to the hot rods and low riders that have been popular for decades. Glow cars are being seen more and more often on the street, with purple neon oozing from beneath their bodies, their wheels turning into disks of pink fire, their interiors radiating a blue glow.

Illuminated cars are the latest thing in car customization, successors to the hot rods and low riders that have been popular for decades. Glow cars are being seen more and more often on the street, with purple neon oozing from beneath their bodies, their wheels turning into disks of pink fire, their interiors radiating a blue glow.

The craze began about a decade ago when Asian-American teenagers in Southern California began to outfit their cars with special body panels, graphics and lights and sometimes tweaked the engines to remake the cars into street racers. Today, young car owners, particularly in the Sun Belt, are lighting every nook and cranny. They install glowing foot pedals and wrap L.E.D. displays around the license plates. They attach bulbs to the tires so the tires become rolling rings of light. They light the area under the hood with strobes or neon tubes and bathe the pavement below in light so the car seems to float over the road.

According to Mitch Williams, president and chief operating officer of Hella, a leading manufacturer of conventional automotive lighting, $250 million is spent annually, much of it by 20-somethings to turn their cars into personalized light shows.

It's a cultural happening, said Freeman Thomas, the head of Daimler-Chrysler's design studio in Pacifica, Calif. You can trace it back to the beginnings of hot rodding because it's youth culture. It's all about taking a base car and doing something with it to make it your own.

The silver Frontier at the New York show was owned by Frank Mauro of Wayne, N.J. Glowing red, white and blue cables, the brand is called HottWirez, curled up the struts supporting the cover of its pickup bed like electric morning glory vines. More red wires lined the interior door panels like piping on a fashionable jacket. Red strobes and purple neon lighted the engine. Written across the windshield in reflective silver foil was the car's name, Sick Silver.

I've really just started with this car, said Mr. Mauro, who has worked on it for the last six months. There's a lot more to add. Sick Silver even comes with a radio-controlled model of itself, a sort of Mini Me that Mr. Mauro or one of his cousins likes to pilot around the feet of showgoers. It, too, is lighted from below with neon.