Toyota 4Runner Owners Share What You Can Do To Prevent Scoop Flash

What is one useful or useless component to any car that will make it automatically cool? If you said hood scoop you are correct. As a kid, seeing a muscle car with a big hood scoop and the air filter sticking out was one of the coolest things ever. Even on regular cars. From the factory, a lot of cars can sometimes come with a fake hood scoop which is technically bad aerodynamics, but it just makes it look cooler.

One down factor to hood scoops, especially chrome scoops is that they reflect direct sunlight right into your eyes. Granted, if you have a wrapped scoop with a matte dark color, it shouldn’t be a problem because dark matte colors do not reflect sunlight that well. However, if in case you drive a red Toyota 4Runner TRD Sport with no scoop livery, then you may experience what I call “scoop flash”.

On Facebook’s Toyota 4Runner group, David Cain posted a picture of him in his 4Runner saying, “I finally understand the sun glare off of the hood scoop that you guys talk about!” Now even though it’s just a picture, I too felt the secondhand glare through my computer screen. Now if you have terrible eye floaters like me (a floater is the squiggly line in your eye when you look at the sun) then this could potentially be a pretty big problem. A front tint won’t do much because not only is it illegal in some states, but the glare would just be dimmer and not go away.

Let’s take a look and see what some owners did to combat this scoop flash. Nick Sprague had a pretty interesting idea. He said, “55% Windshield ir ceramic tint… almost perfectly clear but keeps heat and glare down.” This is pretty useful because a ceramic tint won’t cause the police to pull you over for a fix it ticket. However, it will still keep the glare out in case you don’t want to wrap your hood or scoop.

Kay Elliot said, “$50 you can get a decal off Etsy to take care of that.” I wouldn’t really spend that much on some stickers; however, this too could help you with taking care of that scoop glare. If in case your option was to just wrap or use stickers, nothing like some left over vinyl could help you solve that.

What do you think? How do you take care of that glare? Let us know in the comments below.

Harutiun Hareyan is reporting Toyota news at Torque News. His automotive interests and vast experience test-riding new cars give his stories a sense of authenticity and unique insights. Follow Harutiun on Twitter at @HareyanHarutiun and on Youtube at Toyota Time for daily Toyota news.