Car tuning is modification of the performance or appearance of a vehicle. Most vehicles leave the factory set up for an average driver's expectations and normal conditions. Tuning, on the other hand, has become a way to personalize the characteristics of a vehicle to the owner's preference. Cars may be altered to provide better fuel economy, produce more power, or to provide better handling.
Cars have always been subject to after-market modification. The golden age of car tuning was the decades between World War II and the beginning of air pollution restrictions. In the 1970s and 80s, many Japanese performance cars were never exported outside the Japanese domestic market. Until the late 1980s and early 1990s, grey imports of Japanese performance cars, such as the Nissan Skyline, 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. |
Because of
their low costing tuning equipment and a large availability, 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 mechanical, or racing experience would modify their vehicles to emulate a more impressive versions of racing vehicles, with mixed results. The problem with this is being they are so cheap to bring imports in to Australia modifying them is also a lot cheaper. The younger generation are becoming aware of this and are using these cars for the wrong reason’s destroying our roads and making police worry about who is leaving the “skid”marks on the road instead of crimes that are of a greater seriousness. |