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Tuner Car |
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It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Car tuning. (Discuss) |
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A tuner car, often from an Asian or European manufacturer, is a car that combines comfort, practicality and decent gas mileage with the potential of becoming a high performance vehicle with modifications, primarily to the engine, as they normally provide decent handling due to their light weight and their more sophisticated suspensions.
Tuners are different from supercars in many respects; from price, to engine displacement and horsepower. Yet they're not the typical sedans or SUV import cars either; they are lighter, faster and have better handling.
What distinguishes a tuner from the rest of the cars is that the owner is - in many ways - expected to customize and personalize the car to their liking. They are manufactured in a way that makes it easy for the owners to improve the cars. Some are even de-tuned to meet horsepower limits of other countries. Popular modifications vary from visual upgrades such as changing the rims, tinting the windows and installing bodykits, to performance modifications, which is performed depending on what the car is "tuned" or set up for.
Some Tuner manufacturers offer variants of their cars with performance modifications already installed, such as the Subaru Impreza STi and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution. Due to their relatively smaller engines, these cars often take advantage of turbo-chargers and super-chargers in order to compete with other sports cars.
These are some of the more popularly known tuner cars:
A Tuner also can refer to the driver of a tuner car.
In the 1970s and 80s Japanese motor companies produced many popular performance cars and performance versions of existing cars. However, many of these were never exported beyond Asia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, "gray imports" of Japanese performance cars became abundant in Western Europe and North America, such as the Toyota Supra. Many factors, such as parts being interchangeable, the low cost of obtaining a used imported car, and networking and e-commerce via the Internet all allowed the expansion of the practice of modifying a low-cost compact car. In the United States, this was in direct contrast to the domestic car production around the same time, where there was little widespread performance aftermarket for domestic compact and economy cars. In the United States, the focus was instead on sports cars such as the Ford Mustang or Chevrolet Corvette, or on classic muscle cars.
Because of their light weight and the increasing availability of low-cost tuning equipment, economy cars and compact cars exhibit high performance, at a relatively low cost in comparison to dedicated sports cars. As professional sporting and racing with such vehicles increased, so did more 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.
The major reason of the rise of this class of automobiles into racing scenes was the Rallying competitions, where highly modified tuners race against each others times in twisty roads. This can be seen in today's tuner culture very easily. Roof scoops, gigantic spoilers and drifting all seem to be derived from Rallying.
During the late 90's demand for tuning began to spike with the introduction of a video game franchines 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.
Rally competitions are where tuners from all over the world have been heavily modified and competed against each other in various locations.
In the world of automobile enthusiasts, it is often visible that tuners are compared to Muscle cars all the time.
The primary reason seems to be the fact that both are meant to be modified for better performance. Cars from both of these groups aim at becoming the ultimate sports cars by performing less-costly modifications.
Another theory suggests that the (somewhat antiquated) perception of imports, specifically Japanese cars, is that they are not built to the same standards as American cars (a notion that has lost significant authority in recent decades). Muscle car enthusiasts, partly because of nativism, and partly because their belief in domestic industrial superiority, oppose this relatively new culture of automotive racing. Again, with time this perception has tended to lose credibility due to the rise of a more global economy and deals like NAFTA (As few American cars are built of 100% American parts, and are often built in neighboring countries such as Mexico to reduce costs; Furthermore, to avoid tariffs, many Japanese cars are often built within the United States).
This opposition can be even seen in technical respects. Muscle cars, by definition, were meant to be spacious, durable, non-sophisticated, and powerful; which eventually leads to bigger and heavier cars. That can be considered a disadvantage, as weight has a inversely proportional with handling. Tuners, on the other hand, by definition, are meant to be sophisticated, exact, light, and efficient, while carrying the potential of becoming the ultimate sports cars. In addition to their lightweight, they were also meant to handle well, so they come with more advanced suspension and chassis. However, tuners fall short in front of the massive torque and power the bigger V8s produce. Muscle cars come with powerful engines with linear torque and horsepower curves, resulting the better acceleration and top speed. While tuners, because of their small engines, have sharper torque curves especially when they have turbo-chargers installed, which results in worse torque distribution throughout the different RPMs. This adds the negativity of worse "Off the line" speed, "turbo lag"; the time it takes between hitting the gas pedal, and the turbo to build up enough momentum to, "Kick In." 1
Essentially this makes tuners better in handling and muscle cars better in straight-line acceleration. The generalized idea is that Muscle cars are meant to be drag racing and tuners are meant to be on track or participate in "drifting" competitions. However, this generalized idea has not kept tuners from drag racing and muscle cars from twisty tracks and drifting competitions.
Classical muscle cars were simple, they were heavy and with generally poor handling. Although modern muscle such as the Chevrolet Camaro Concept, Ford Mustang, Dodge Challenger, and Dodge Charger retain the large V8 engines although, have modern suspension, are a good deal lighter, and with computers are more complex, this also improves fuel economy greatly.
The essence of modification of a Tuner Car is an attempt to extract the greatest possible performance from the base motor vehicle through the addition, alteration or outright replacement of parts. Although this largely involves modifying the engine and management systems of the vehicle to increase the power output, additional changes are often required to allow the vehicle to handle this power including stiffened suspension, widened tires, better brakes, improved steering and transmission modifications. Although largely invisible from outside the vehicle certain modifications, such as low profile tyres, altered suspension and the addition of spoilers can change the overall appearance of the car.
As mentioned earlier, Tuners, because of their small engines, have sharper torque curves especially when they have turbo-chargers installed, which results in worse torque distribution throughout the different RPMs. This adds the negativity of worse "Off the line" speed, which is called "turbo-lag"; the time it takes between hitting the gas pedal, and the turbo to build up enough momentum to, "Kick In." Although some tuners based on weight loss and naturally-aspirated engines exist and don't suffer from the lag, the near universal use of turbochargers over superchargers contributes greatly to the issue. Although recently, the more professional tuners use light weight ceramic blades in their turbos to reduce lag.
For more information, please visit the Rice Burner and Car Tuning pages.
Although Tuners have proven to be very successful as high performance vehicles when tuned properly, they are often confused with "Ricers" and referred to as "posers". "Ricing" is the term that has become popular to describe their form of posing.
Ricing as a verb, a term usually refused by the "Ricer" him/herself to be used, means modifying (normally Tuner) cars to look high performance, or rather unique; while they lack the performance they pretend to have. It can be seen in many forms such as using "fart can" loud exhausts, neon under-body lighting, fake carbon fiber, and non-functional or excessively large aerodynamic add-ons.
Ricing, derived from the term "Rice Burner" has a long history with tuners. "Rice Burner" was what East Asian Tuners were use to be referred to as. But in today's racing culture, Ricing does not necessarily refer to tuners. There are Tuners that have been modified to only perform better, rather than visual modification, thus making the term inappropriate to describe them.
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