lamboblogging

Now every real car enthusiast will say “it doesn’t matter what car it is if the person driving it is happy” or some generic thing like that, I totally agree but this isn’t what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is the expectation for Japanese cars in general. There is a huge community of jdm enthusiasts (Japanese domestic market) ((imported Japanese cars)), late 80s to early 2000s Japanese cars. Now I’m a Japanese person, I was born in japan and my parents are both Japanese. It’s no secret that Japanese people and culture have a way with respecting things and attention to detail. This is why japan makes high quality cars, stationary, food, fine crafts, literature, computers and so on. (Not to say other countries don’t have developments but this is pretty obvious). This culture combined with the youth’s obsession with cars in the golden age of Japanese cars created one of the most influential car cultures in the world. I believe that the Nissan GT-R had made global headlines when a 50k$ car was beating the 911 turbo at 230k. But it wasn’t by chance or magic that this happened.

The Japanese market for high performance cars had never really been that big in Japan, as they started reaching the golden age like the rx7, Supra, 240sx, gtr, s15, and so on, they had been entering an economic decline, their birth rates were dropping and so on. This relates to the economic prosperity of Korea and the mass manufacturing developments with China and how the United States had been controlling many aspects of Japan’s trade since the war. What this means is that there were not that many high paying jobs and adjusted to inflation, minimum wage was about 6$. (It’s still pretty close to that). In a country based on mass technical skill based manufacturing exports, people weren’t able to afford 100k$ sports cars, so that is why they mass developed and over engineerd their engines and chassis designs. To make it extremely practical and affordable while conforming to user base meta. However even then, owning a sports car in japan didn’t make any sense, Japan’s highway speed limit is 80kmh and 40kmh in the city, they had extremely restrictive emissions regulations, cars would be impounded and junked for speeding. So what’s the point of a performance car? A lot of what applied on top still applies to this day but one of the bigger points is that it is totally illegal to make any performance modifications or major body modifications and you have to send in your car for regulatory inspection and send proof of inspection to the government every year. Engine modifications and drifting was enough to get you imprisoned. The only people doing this were delinquents, wealthy businessmen, and those who had protection from the Japanese mafia or had political power. This era of strict automotive regulations but with the Japanese culture of over engineering things gave birth to a few heroes: like Kei Miura who made aero kits for track cars now know as (rocket bunny), Kazuhiko Nagata who is best knows for building some of the highest performance Japanese modified cars in history (and doing 220mph in london with a v12 Supra), and Tsuchiya Keiichi or “drift king” (a famous racecar driver who was so successful in racing that he got bored and started intentionally under steering his cars in races).

With all this, the western youth car enthusiast group interpreted it as “Japanese manufacturers made super cars for super cheap and created a platform that was very easy to modify” this is why you see twin turbo 2jz supras do 1000hp 2.4sec 0-60 runs. But this new breed of car enthusiasts are in my opinion at least, very stupid. Modifying any car isn’t actually that cheap and any performance oriented car after 60% of its values in tuning and modifications that are detrimental to its practicality and longevity will beat a quarter million dollar supercar in launch or power.

What pisses me off are stupid people who claim that companies killed their best cars by changing them. The world doesn’t revolve around them, they should know that in mass car manufacturers, their high performance cars contribute only a tiny bit to their overall revenue, there is comparatively much less demand for a new Supra. It’s no surprise that the new mk5 Supra was based off of a bmw platform, Toyota of all companies have absolutely no incentive to ground up design a high performance car for a handful of fanboys in a western country when normal cars are dying off in general in Japan. Other than speed and flex factor, there is no reason to own anything bigger than a K-car (or Japanese microcars that have tax exemptions, good fuel economy, are affordable and practical for Japanese roads). So the idea that they should even try to build a car for a western meta is already stupid. once more,it frustrates me to see these kids insult this car because of its performance numbers, it’s a 45k$ car!, why are you expecting it to do 600hp and top out at 180mph like a gtr does? Modern cars have modern regulations, it makes no sense to me. This same logic applies to the hate of all modern Japanese sports cars.

TLDR: Jdm Supra fanboys are stupid because their expectations and hate for the new Supra are not grounded in reality.

Submitted May 30, 2021 at 07:55AM by ilovecakeshark https://ift.tt/3i4yVLB