Could your car be a work of art? Let's see the colour of your money

Published on Friday 21 April 2006 00:05

WHEN people think of modified cars they tend to imagine a battered old Vauxhall Nova with three-spoke alloys, furry dice and a 3ft-high spoiler being driven by a chav with bum fluff under his nose and a Burberry baseball cap.

But there is an entirely different aspect to the modified car market. One which sees extremely affluent customers spending up to 60,000 on modifying a Peugeot hatchback when with the same money they could buy a Porsche 911 and still have enough money left over for a slap-up dinner at Toni's steak house.

"I see a modified car as a work of art," says Diane Paterson, co-founder of Peugeot Ecosse, a garage which has built a reputation as "the cover car factory".

She explains: "The whole project is something that grows and evolves almost into a personality of its own - it's not just another car."

The key to a successful modification, it seems, is uniqueness. "We don't do clones," adds 33-year-old Diane who, since 1997, has run the Bo'ness business with co-founder Matt Collins, 34. "No two cars we've ever made here are the same and, if anyone can say they've got something similar, then we didn't build it. Copies are for people who don't have enough imagination and I think that's our biggest strength. People modify to be different, to have an edge, to be individual. To go down the road of creating something that's the same as someone else's defeats the point of modifying."

The designs are certainly eye-catching. Dotted around the West Lothian premises are beefed-up Peugeots in various striking colours, including pink, orange and green.

A woman who clearly takes pride in her work, Diane is far from impressed at the sight of a young man in a rather old and, more significantly, unmodified 205 with a bootleg Peugeot Ecosse sticker slapped across the windscreen.

"People want to say that their car's been done here even when it hasn't," she says. "Some will pay 30 to get the window sticker but we don't want our name on a car that doesn't look right. We don't sell the stickers. We give them out free of charge to the cars that make the grade. There's some really bad examples of what people do but we can always recognise our cars."

And it's this perfectionism and endless pursuit of the unique which has seen Diane's cars grace the front cover of 50 motoring magazines, including Max Power, Redline and Fast Car.

Peugeot Ecosse vehicles have also won prestigious Super GTI Top 20 titles for the best modifications in Europe four times. The firm, which employs 12 people, attracts customers from as far away as Cyprus, Russia, Bermuda and Denmark.

Even the movies have come calling to Bo'ness. Several Ecosse cars featured as the preferred transport for Sacha Baron Cohen's crew in Ali G In Da House.

One of the garage's crowning glories is a 306 Sedan modified back in the late Nineties. Matt decided he wanted to do something completely different - and so the Sedan was transformed from a 90bhp four-door into a 360bhp two-door, with truly amazing results.

"We took it to a Peugeot motor show in France and even the people from Peugeot were confused - they thought they must have released a special edition two-door, but it didn't exist until we built it," explains Diane.

But, and it is clearly a question Diane is accustomed to answering, why Peugeot? "Why not?" she asks. "Every car has a specialist involved with modifications and we felt there wasn't really anything focused on Peugeots. We spotted that niche after being involved with the Peugeot club in Scotland. There's nobody else that does a complete one-stop shop.

"We do everything from services and tuning to full body kit conversions and spray painting."

One of the most extreme examples in the garage is a 206 GTI 180 with, among its many dazzling features, 5,500 HRE alloys imported from the United States.

Other modifications which can be made at this extreme end of the market are sound systems costing up to 10,000, body kitting for 15,000 and nitrous oxide canisters - capable of adding an extra 50bhp to your car - for 1,000. A few more thousand pounds can be spent on television screens, an iPod, a games console such as a PS2 or an Xbox and another 8,000 on top-of-the-range seats.

"It can be an expensive hobby," says Diane. "You can modify cheaply but if it's not done right then you're devaluing your car. Our modifications certainly aren't going to devalue it."

However, she is keen to point out that not all conversions need to be taken to such lengths. "6-7,000 still gets a good modification," she says. "It's all about the results you're looking for. If you want something different then you've got to go to the different end of the market. People might ask their pal to wire the stereo or spray their car and we just know what kind of job it's going to be.

"It's not about what you want to spend, it's about what you want to achieve. If it's above your means then you've got a problem. Don't do a spoiler half-arsed. Keep the money. Don't do something in the interim. It just looks cheap and people won't want to buy your car - or it'll turn into something even you don't want any more. We are the right people to do the job because we know what we're doing."

But what does Diane, who currently drives a 205 with 319bhp, think of the whole boy/girl racer stereotype?

"I think it's all about the driver inside," she says. "It's easy to pigeonhole people into boy racers or girl racers running around at 100mph but the kind of people who spend a lot of money modifying their cars don't do that because they have respect for them. They know what it costs to maintain them."