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"         My heart sank the other day as I was surfing through various automotive blog sites, part of my morning ritual. These days, my morning cup of green tea isn&amp;#039;t complete without a dose of bad news, especially regarding things financial. This one struck close to home because I was quite familiar with the player. The Japanese aftermarket company, Trust, had declared the Japanese equivalent of Chapter 11. It was disappointing to be sure, but not altogether a surprise. Tuner companies in Japan have been folding one after another the past few years...and the current worldwide financial crisis will probably claim more. Trust (known as GReddy here in the States) was one of the pioneers of the tuning revolution that swept Japan a few decades ago, ultimately coming to and flourishing in America. But the segment has fallen off the proverbial cliff in Japan, and all indications are that the U.S. will follow suit.   So what happened?   You can always point your finger at the economy, but another culprit is the lack of car enthusiasm in Japan. On a recent trip there, I didn&amp;#039;t see a single sports car driving around the streets of Tokyo. Instead, there were an army of kei cars (tiny cars powered by 660-cc engines) and boxy crossovers, with names and shapes unfamiliar to us. So if you&amp;#039;ve ever wondered why hasn&amp;#039;t built a proper sports car since the MR2 Spyder (and really hasn&amp;#039;t needed to), it&amp;#039;s because Japanese drivers, as a whole, have become boring.   Another reason for the steep decline in Japanese tuner cars is the complexity of today&amp;#039;s production cars. These sporty cars are now laden with gizmos whose basic operation would challenge a Ph.D. from MIT. And with most small aftermarket companies in Japan started by former hashiriya (guys who roamed the country roads of Japan in flamboyant souped-up machines), they just don&amp;#039;t have the resources to tweak today&amp;#039;s cars. It&amp;#039;s like asking a hang glider pilot to figure out the Space Shuttle. Mitsuyo Niikura, the president of Mine&amp;#039;s (who&amp;#039;s not a former hashiriya, but rather an engineer with Bridgestone Tires), told me: &amp;quot;There isn&amp;#039;t a whole lot we could do with today&amp;#039;s sophisticated cars, including the . Before, we used to be able to power up R32s and R33s with a simple turbo kit and chip, but not this latest version. You would need to completely reengineer the car to get the gains we saw before.&amp;quot;   So what&amp;#039;s left for the Japanese tuner market? I asked my friend Jun Toyoda, the CEO of HKS U.S.A, one of the few Japanese aftermarket tuners still moving its products.   &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a tough time to be sure. With automobiles as a whole not selling, things for the aftermarket are even tougher. But if we concentrate on producing things in the aftermarket that meet the demand of the public, we should be okay \u2014 this may take the form of marketing performance parts for a popular minivan or economy car. There should always be a need for customization. What&amp;#039;s important is to market your products accordingly,&amp;quot; he said.   One place where things haven&amp;#039;t gone south, yet, is the luxury tuning segment. According to CEC President Claus Ettensberger, the high-end market hasn&amp;#039;t been affected as much. As the sole distributors for AC Schnitzer, Brabus, TechArt and Novitec Rosso, CEC does a reasonably good business as the premier luxury aftermarket supplier in the U.S.   &amp;quot;We definitely feel a big pinch with the current crisis, but we are still doing adequate business. The rich will always have money to spend, no matter what happens. Naturally, many of them are deciding against buying a super expensive car now because they don&amp;#039;t want to flaunt their wealth in this current situation. But then there are those who don&amp;#039;t care \u2014 we just delivered a Novitec Rosso-tuned Ferrari to a customer who had $137,000 of tweaking performed on it. So while we have been affected, we&amp;#039;re far from being leveled,&amp;quot; Ettensberger said.   But he&amp;#039;s quick to add that things will probably never return to where they were before. &amp;quot;The era of &amp;#039;bling bling&amp;#039; has come to an end,&amp;quot; said Ettensberger. &amp;quot;People will look for quality products and not settle for cheap alternatives. I think this current financial crisis will end up weeding out the low-quality pretenders in our business.&amp;quot;   This statement rings true with the import tuning shops, too. It&amp;#039;s nice to know that GReddy will continue to do business in the States, saying on its website that the sinking of the mother ship will have &amp;quot;little, if any effect&amp;quot; on GReddy&amp;#039;s day-to-day operations in America. As much damage as this financial hurricane has caused to the automotive market, let&amp;#039;s hope tuning companies like GReddy survive because I&amp;#039;m not ready to be labeled as boring just yet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a14699/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-again-of-tuning/>