Then and Now: 20 Years of Tuning
A lot can happen in 20 years. Let’s see, 20 years ago I was single, entering my freshman year of college, driving an Acura Integra GS-R and had started my first “corporate” job working at a hospital. Fast forward and I’m married, have our first child, driving an Audi and have been at my current corporate job 17 years…yikes. Disclaimer: These are all scans of actual film images, no phone cameras or digital cameras back in 94' :) The same can be said for aftermarket tuning – technology grows in leaps and bounds (as we’ve seen with the internet) and it’s easy to forget how quickly things can change, yet stay the same. Let’s take a look back at things then vs. nowTuning in 1994
As far as “tunable” cars go, this was the golden age…no such thing as OBD, but at the same token, there wasn’t anything readily available at your local performance shop. Hell, there weren’t any local performance shops…. Most parts were ordered from a catalog and shipped from Japan. This was before the term “JDM” even existed. In 94, the sportiest cars were:- Nissan Sentra SE-R
- Honda Civic Si
- Ford Escort GT
- Ford Mustang GT
- Volkswagen Corrado
- Toyota MR-2 Turbo
- Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo
- Mazda RX7
- Acura NSX
- Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4
Tuning Today
Fast-forward to today, you can’t let your tire pressure drop without a warning light. The good news is you can go to Pep-Boys and pickup a diagnostic reader that will allow you to turn this off, as well as get detailed info on how your car is running. A quick search on the net will provide a myriad of results on how to mod/tune your car and you can even find forums with tons of “experts” telling you how to mod your car (forums and the Internet are other things which were just getting started in 1994), think about that for a minute… Today’s sports car list:- Honda Civic Si
- Nissan 350Z / Nissan GTR
- Scion FR-S
- Hyundai Genesis Coupe
- Ford Focus ST
- Lexus LFA
- $19650 MSRP
- 170HP/128TQ
- 2650lbs
- $24700 MSRP
- 200HP/151TQ
- 2758lbs