I, like many young car enthusiasts, love racing games and tuner cars (JDM), yet I have never enjoyed Need For Speed. The car physics, story drama, almost trap-exclusive soundtrack, and action is Fast and Furious level cheesy. But worse, it glorifies and promotes actual incredibly dangerous street racing and takeovers that have resulted in the deaths of innocent people, it demonizes all cops as malicious and nasty, and it’s a disgraceful representation of tuner and modified car culture.

Something that’s becoming a major issue in cities across America (trending on TikTok) are “street takeovers.” It’s where people take their tuner cars or modern muscle cars to street race, perform drifts and donuts, and make an insane amount of noise via their cars and music, disturbing the peace in the middle of the night, waking people up and scaring them. It’s an incredibly terrible thing that goes down where young adults or innocent people (like pedestrians) get injured or even killed and leave significant damage to the streets and parked cars. Drugs and gun possession are also common at these events. Street takeovers have been publicized enough that citizens in Los Angeles are protesting the filming of Fast and Furious 10 (Fast X). Overall, it makes many modified car enthusiasts look like anarchists and criminals. These street takeovers also scare the public into supporting current and future laws that ban car modifications like aftermarket exhausts, which is a big issue facing modified car culture and car enthusiasts. The world featured in the Need For Speed series encourages this activity, since any 3 second warning that pops up before the game is probably not going to be read and fully understood by its young player demographic, and to make matters worse, the game teaches you that all street racers and criminals are doing the right thing and all cops are evil.

Need For Speed’s representation of modified car culture is inaccurate and unacceptable. They managed to take all of these modified car pioneers and celebrities like Akira Nakai and Magnus Walker, along with famous drivers like Ken Block and Vaughn Gittin Jr. and add them as characters, for example. These are heroes that I and many other car enthusiasts admire. The cars and aftermarket part companies featured we are fans of as well, and featuring all of them in this game is just wrong.

Need For Speed’s newest otaku rap-themed entry, Unbound (starring rapper A$AP Rocky), arrives this December. If you vote for this petition, hopefully we can get Electronic Arts to wake up and realize how bad this game series is, how it influences illegal activity, how that illegal activity influences the public to support the banning of car modifications, and how Need For Speed is a bad representation and stereotype of tuner and modified car culture. The Forza and Gran Turismo series do racing games and car culture right. Need For Speed does it wrong.