Toronto’s car-meets have developed a strange pattern.
Organizers promote their events online while warning everyone: NO BURNOUTS. NO REVVING. NO 2-STEP. Pretty basic instructions if you want to respect the property and keep the meet going. Then darkness falls, somebody revs an engine or a motorcycle cranks the throttle. Somebody shows off their tune and flames shoot from an exhaust pipe while half the parking lot raises their phones to film. By the next morning, those are the clips getting shared all over social media.
That contradiction finally caught up with a car meet organizer at SkyCity Shopping Centre in Scarborough. The recent ‘we got kicked out‘ post explained that property management had withdrawn permission to host meets there because of excessive revving and reckless driving. The comments section on IG quickly found a villain: a Hyundai Elantra N.
“That fucking Elantra,” wrote one person, earning hundreds of likes. But blaming one Hyundai is too easy. The Elantra broke the written rules. Culturally, it did exactly what these meets reward.
If NO REVVING appears on every IG poster, but revving happens at every meet, the rule eventually starts looking like hollow words. Organizers say the right things in their promos and in discussions with property management, but everyone knows what gets attention. Shooting flames makes spectators cheer, photographers rush over and clips spread across social media.
Even the posters need to change. If the small print says NO REVVING while the main image shows a tuned car shooting flames into the night, what message does that really send? The words say one thing, while the imagery tells people what kind of night to expect. Before anyone even arrives, the culture of the event has already been advertised.
I saw that contradiction myself at Kennedy Commons in June. The organizer posted stern warnings against revving, donuts, burnouts and sliding. The irony was impossible to miss: the promotional poster featured a G35 shooting flames from its exhaust.
Ironically, that meet stayed fairly calm. There was no 2-step or redlining and no major chaos. Everyone was eventually told to leave by police, but not because the parking lot had descended into madness. The landlord simply did not want the gathering on the property. Within minutes, the meet relocated to SkyCity.
That is what made that June night so memorable. Kennedy Commons did not want the car meet at all, while SkyCity seemed willing to tolerate it. Sure, all those kids in hot cars were a little noisy, but they were also spending money at the bubble tea shops and restaurants. For a while, the car crowd had found an east-end home.
So what went wrong?
There are sanctioned car meets, like the one at Woodside Square earlier in the summer, where the wild atmosphere is part of the show. It was a permitted event, and the landlord had roped off a section of the parking lot for show participants. Rev-bombs, exhaust pops and shooting flames were part of the spectacle. And it was kind of glorious.
But SkyCity was different. It is an active shopping centre, with customers and pedestrians making their way through the parking lot. A property owner tolerating a bunch of gearheads hanging out and playing their music a little too loud is one thing. But once the meet crosses into reckless behaviour, the landlord has to react. If customers feel unsafe or simply stay away, the businesses lose money.
And that is exactly what happened at Kennedy Commons more than a decade ago.
The Scarborough Meets comment section on IG understood the problem.
One person wrote, “When you post photos and clips of people revving and doing stupid shit you’re giving them the attention they’re begging for.” That is exactly the issue. Car meet organizers want the social-media attention generated by loud cars, underglow, huge crowds and an exciting night scene. They are not lying when they say they want people to behave. They have to convince landlords that the excitement will stay within acceptable limits.
But culture is shaped by what gets rewarded, not just by what gets written in the rules.
Every driver is responsible for their own behaviour, and That Fucking Elantra certainly did not invent the culture that rewarded him. He made noise and shot flames, people turned around, the phones came out, and suddenly a Hyundai became the most discussed car of the night.
That is the problem in a nutshell.
Hooligan behaviour will not stop because somebody adds another NO REVVING line to an Instagram poster. It will stop when organizers stop using that behaviour to sell the atmosphere of their meets, when their social feeds stop rewarding it, and when the crowd stops sprinting across the parking lot every time somebody shoots flames as though it is the main event of the evening.
So, in other words, it’ll never stop.
😉