IS YOUR HOT ROD TRADITIONAL SAYS WHO?

Hot rods, street rods, traditional rods, and other definitions we'll never agree on.

- TIM BERNSAU

There are a few concepts that send my brain revving above mental redline. One is infinity. Another is time travel. The third is trying to define the difference between hot rods, street rods, traditional rods, and rat rods.

When the first issue of HOT ROD came out 75 years ago, the name they chose for the magazine was a new term, only a few years old and still loaded with negative associations. Every car that appeared in HOT ROD in our early years was a '40s-style hot rod for the obvious reason that it was the 1940s. It would be a couple years before '50s-style hot rods, and more than a decade before '60s-style cars were included. Makes sense, right?

Eventually, the pre-World War II American-made cars that made up all our content in the early years started sharing these pages with other categories of hot rods including muscle cars, customs, race cars, trucks, imports-even motorcycles and vans.

As the definition of "hot rod" expanded, even prewar cars started drifting into various new categories, such as street rods, traditional rods, and a little later, rat rods. We're going to take a stab at deciphering the meaning of "street rod" and "traditional rod." Are they the same thing, completely different, or is there some overlap?