This is a web-site dedicated to a few of my favorite tuner cars.
A tuner car, often from Japan, 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.