Car tuning

Car tuning is both an industry and a hobby, in which an automobile, motor bike, scooter or moped is modified in order to improve its performance, handling and presentation and improve the owner's driving style. As most vehicles leave the factory set up for average driver expectations and average conditions, tuning has become a way to personalize the characteristics of the vehicle to the owner's preference. For example, they may be altered to provide better fuel economy, produce more power at high RPM or the ride comfort may be sacrificed to provide better handling.

Car tuning is related to auto racing, although most performance cars never compete. Rather they are built for the pleasure of owning and driving such a vehicle. Another major facet of tuning includes performance modification to the car exterior. This includes changing the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle via side skirts, front and rear bumpers, adding spoilers, splitters, air vents and light weight wheels.

Origin of tuning

In the 1970s and 80s, many Japanese performance cars were never exported outside the Japanese domestic market. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, grey imports of Japanese performance cars, such as the Nissan Skyline [1][1] [2][3], began to be privately imported into Western Europe and North America. In the United States, this was in direct contrast to the domestic car production around the same time, where there was a very small performance aftermarket for domestic compact and economy cars; the focus was instead on sporty cars such as the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Corvette, or on classic muscle cars.

Because of their light weight and the increasing availability of low-cost tuning equipment, economy and compact cars exhibit high performance at a low cost in comparison to dedicated sports cars. As professional sporting and racing with such vehicles increased, so did recreational use of these vehicles. Drivers with little or no automotive, mechanical, or racing experience would modify their vehicles to emulate the more impressive versions of racing vehicles, with mixed results.

Also a rise of this class of automobiles into racing scenes was the Rallying competitions, where highly modified tuners race against each other on twisty roads and are timed.This has led to some public styling like on the Impreza models.

During the late '90s, demand for tuning began to spike in many countries with the introduction of a video game franchise by the name of Gran Turismo for the Sony PlayStation. It showed that normal everyday cars could be transformed into high performance vehicles for racing. Also the internet showed people what could be done to their cars and the after market parts scene became wider and more available so people could buy more parts than they had been able to before.The modding tuning side had been around for many years where we see Skylines in races down to the 60's and drifting in the 70's and BMW's tuned and racing from the 60's also just a few cars which were tuned and raced from years ago.