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From the Armchair – Our Little Baby All Grown Up
By by: George Achorn, photos by author
Aug 15, 2005, 23:02

My friends who are parents tell me it’s practically a teary-eyed occasion when your child hits a milestone like walking, talking or curing cancer. Unfortunately, I’m not a parent yet, so I’ll have to project that parental pride on other innocuous things, like one of the kids I’d forgotten I’d been involved in raising – a “kid” who reminded me of its presence two weekends ago while I was attending Deutsche Werks 2005.

On hand during the ceremony, I caught the name of a particular class; that of OEMplus. “No kidding,” I thought to myself. “That’s a class?”

What’s OEMplus you ask? I’m guessing if you read this site, you already know. But for those not familiar, I’ll give you a quick rundown. OEMplus is a modding style, much like Euro or Rat Style.

The theme of OEMplus is more, well, OEM. The VAG partsbin, a.k.a. the Lego toybox, is the primary source for modding in this particular genre. In the days this was beginning, 17-inch Beetle sport wheels were a big deal. Nowadays, 19-inch Phaeton wheels and twin-turbo W12 Bentley engines mark a whole new ceiling that ensure it’ll be a while until we fully hit it.

It doesn’t end at the partsbin though. Perhaps it does if you’re a purist, but I’m not, so let’s move along. I’ve always considered the jump to be aftermarket parts that either look or operate in an OEM fashion. Parts like reproduction R32 bumpers, Hartmann Audi replica wheels, or super-clean lighting upgrades like Hella’s Mk V-look headlights for the Mk IV come to mind.

A couple of months back, I remember reading Performance VW and seeing their preview for the next month. It listed a yellow Golf from America as being the OEMplus style. The preview read something like this. “What’s OEMplus you ask? Learn more next month when you see this Golf.”

Now, I’m not going to be one of those jokers who tries to say he invented the OEMplus style, ala Al Gore and his claim of Internet invention. But I was there when the style got its name. I started the thread where the term was coined, though I honestly forget who the smarter guy than I was who came up with the tagline. It stuck though.



Perhaps one of you with more time than me will search the archives for it (it’s not all that important), but as I remember it, the naming went down something like this…

We were chatting about the style. I’d been pushing it in my Project Golf 1.8T, while other companies like Parts4VWs and users on the forum such as Blitzen155 were pioneering the importation of Euro-only parts for retrofit on our American cars and multiplying the number of Legos we had in the toy box at our disposal. We decided it needed a name, it’s own identity.

Today, that toy box has grown and multiplied. The sheer number of these sorts of OEM or plus-described upgrades have multiplied tenfold. Tuners and owners have pushed the envelope further and further, and this particularly struck me a bit several weeks ago at a barbacue at Achtuning. Josh from Achtuning showed me their new 20-lb. FORGED B7 RS 4 replica wheels!!!!! Are you kidding? It’s becoming more and more apparent we’ve moved to another level.



Anyway, back to Deutsche Werks, they called the winner. It was a particularly clean black Jetta GLI owned by Bill Post with Blitzkrieg Tuners – a club located in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania. Bill’s a great guy, with a beautiful Jetta. It’s clean as heck. Too clean perhaps, as he mentioned to me that it’s been impossible to get magazine photographers at shows to take a shot of the car for their show writeups.



That’s the downside to OEMplus. It’s clean…. maybe too clean for the mags that tend to focus on over-the-top. Ultra-clean Euro gets attention in print too, but that’s one modding genre that’s earned its stripes. Hopefully OEMplus will make it to that level at some point as well. For now, I’ll just wipe the figurative tear from my eye as Bill’s girlfriend accepts his award for him. Like a proud communal parent, I’ll take a little bit of pride in knowing I was one of the family who got the movement going. Long live OEMplus.

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