Tuning
Every vehicle designed for mass production and public consumption leaves the factory meant for, built for, and equipped for average driver operation under average road and weather conditions. Car tuning personalizes a vehicle to meet the owner's personal tastes and persona, making the vehicle unique to them and specific to his or her needs. For instance, an owner who must drive a great deal for work may tune his car to get better gas mileage than it would if left in its original condition, or "stock"; another may take her vehicle to the drag strip on the weekends to race and needs more torque than the car was originally equipped with, so her focus is on enhancing her vehicle's torque ratio. Each of these is an example of car tuning.
People who are interested in car tuning can do it as a hobby or make it into a career. There is a great demand for those who have the knowledge to enhance vehicles to share their talent. Such an individual can focus on tuning under the hood, enhancing gas mileage, increasing torque, or increasing RPMs, for example, or on the bodies of vehicles, focusing on making them more aerodynamic and stylish by adding spoilers, splitters, blowers, side skirts, and font and/or rear bumpers. Some tuners focus on wheels, some even going to far as to design and manufacture their own custom, lightweight wheels for their own vehicles as well as friends, relatives, and even clients. Still others focus on the interiors of vehicles, specializing in audio and video tuning, upholstery, and interior structure tuning. Audio/video tuners, for example, specialize in installing high quality stereo equipment and DVD setups, while interior structure tuners know how to remove seats to make more room for items such as extra speakers, and enhance the car's seating, such as when the front seats are replaced with racing bucket seats. Such individuals are known as car stylers.
Virtually every aspect of a vehicle can be tuned; all it takes is an eye for detail, a thorough knowledge of vehicles, and a passion about automobiles.