Minkara #2: I Saw The Pedals Glo

Minkara is a Japanese social media website that is fully dedicated to the automobile. It's primary focus is allowing people to share their stories, experience, and knowledge with the car that they own and have that available to other people, using the website's blogging capabilities and thorough sorting and filtering capabilities for brands and types of parts. If you have a JDM car in The West and are wanting an additional resource for information and parts review, there are few better places to go than the website who's title roughly translates to Everyone's Car Life.

But this chapter isn't about my JDM car, it's about my second car.

Gas exploded in price as a direct result of Fascist leader of the United States Donald Trump orchestrating preemptive strikes on Iran, which would lead to the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz for cargo ships, greatly affecting the transit of oil. A second car was a long time coming; something a bit more reasonable on gas than a sequentially twin-turbocharged, automatic, four-wheel drive Subaru from the turn of the century. The answer would eventually be a 2006 Scion xB: a car that was never actually sold in Canada in it's first generation but a common import from our neighbors to the South.

It's body inside and out are thoroughly thrashed from lack of care by it's previous owners, including a horrific rust situation on the left rear quarter from mud buildup around the fuel filler neck that never got rinsed away. Mechanically, the only thing it really needed was the basic upkeep of a oil change, spark plugs, and a fresh battery. After the initial shock of the rust and the impending challenge to prevent it's spread, it was time to have fun and see what could be done with it to make it truly mine instead of flipping it and making it someone else's problem.

A RAZO shift knob and a factory rear wing were among the first things done, with the wing being the happy consequence of buying a replacement trunk that already had the mounting holes for a wing installed. But there is always more to be done to make a car truly yours, and that can mean finding whatever you can however you can to make you happy on your terms alone. Facebook marketplace is incredible in that regard: allowing one man's trash is another man's treasure to be possible in the blink of an eye, or from the glow at one's feet in this case.

Finding a new old stock set of APC Glo Pedals on Facebook marketplace completely took me by surprise. Who would save these? Pedals from the sport compact, tuner car era were among the myriad of things people would do to their cars because that was just the thing to do in the wake of the original The Fast and The Furious. Make your tuner car a little bit garish, outlandish, and uhapologetically yours while being unafraid of how others may perceive it. Clean being a synonym for good as the zeitgeist of modified car culture was still more than a decade away and Sex-Spec dominated magazines and car shows alike. Things would change with the onset of the global housing crisis in the end of the 2000s; with NOPI and Hot Import Nights not having the same impact entering the 2010s and magazines like Super Street and Sport Compact Car having to adapt, or die.

Aftermarket parts manufactures either leaped at the opportunity or were created to cash in on the craze, which included APC. APC, short for American Products Company, shined bright in this era before quickly burning out in February 2007. They tried to make and do everything, after initial success in creating Altezza-style taillights for every car they could. You could throw APC-made parts at a lot of areas that you only needed basic hand tools to change, though quality and function was always suspect and it's cultural cache was already coming to an end.

But a set of pedals that had a section that would light up when wired into your car's parking lights? Twenty years on, it's taken on a new light. There's a sincerity to something as silly pedals that light up. It's like seeing a kid that has the shoes that light up when they take a step: that kid is living large in the best way. They are lighting up the world, and most importantly theirs. And I mean, putting RGB light-up parts on one's computer setup is still commonplace right?

Ok, these need to get installed in the Scion.

The APC Glo Pedals in the green three pedal set, part number 10.5851, features the three pedals pre-assembled, the wiring harness for lighting up that center section, and the mounting tab for the gas pedal in a separate bag. The back side of the carboard packaging has the basic instructions for the clutch and the brake pedals, but don't tell you what to do with the gas pedal having a separate mounting plate that attaches to the gas pedal, before you attach the actual gas pedal to it. The instructions didn't give me the best understanding of what I needed to do, but did you know that Summit Racing still has the .pdf of the instructions on their website somehow?

It was the gas pedal I struggled with the most in the initial install before understanding it was the bracket that made a flat mating surface to screw the pedal face onto. Bigger struggles would come later as the base of the clutch pedal and the screws that fasten the mounting bars to the factory pedal stuck out too much behind, and would prevent full clutch travel from occurring. Before taking a mini Milwaukee saw to the pedal and the screws, the clutch pedal would barely hit the clutch switch for starting up the car, let alone shift into reverse or drive without protest. I also cut out a bit of the insulation foam behind the carpet where the clutch pedal goes to the floor to give it that little bit extra room for travel. There is a major level of adjustability to the orientation and position of the pedals to suit, but the main thing will always be to ensure it doesn't compromise being able to actually drive the car. It took a while, but we got there.

Now, the important part: the glow of the glo pedals. Within all the wiring for the Scion xB underneath the dash is a four wire connector harness with green wires going into it. Using a multi-meter you will see that one of them gets 12 volts of power when the parking lights are switched on. Separate that wire so that there's enough space for a splice connector for connecting to the power wire for the glo pedals. Right nearby is a metal brace for the dash with some holes in it, which is ideal for your ground wire once a ground connector gets crimped into the end of it. The harness then goes to a junction box, and then has plugs that match the relative expected distance to the wiring on each of the pedals. The trick will always be hiding the wiring away after either zip-tying or using electrical tape to attach the pedal side of the wiring to the arm of the pedals. It'll be a mess on the back side of the dash, but the wiring will get tucked away and the reward is one of the silliest things that will bring me joy any time I have to flick on the parking lights on my Scion xB.

This past that the American Products Company Glow Pedals was a part of was a past I never got to live, but only watch from afar in magazines and in games like Need For Speed Underground. These were parts not meant to stand the test of time, but instead be fully emblematic of a moment where you can do this to your car and the culture of the time encouraged it. It was cool to install pedals that lit up, taillights that had clear housings, and put way too many brand decals on your car while only having maybe StreetGlow actually represented with their neon underneath your Ford Focus ZX3. The culture would consume itself as the sinophobic term ricer used for criticizing such parts, their lack of performance, and overall execution by associating it with where the parts and the cars came from, the parts from China and the cars Japan or Korea, would be those initial throws leading us to the clean culture that dominates car social media algorithms today. In that regard, maybe it's better that some elements of that past I didn't get to live stays there; though some of those elements that replaced it aren't much better either.

Instead, I get to chance to celebrate the fact that we dared to embrace the absurd with our cars and a brand that was fully onboard with that. Perhaps, too onboard.