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The Tokyo Auto Salon is more than just drift cars and hot women. The Tokyo Auto Salon isn't just race queens, VIP sedans and drift cars; there are other, more interesting rides to be found on the show floor. While other magazines are content to just show you yet another picture of Nomuken's Skyline, we go out of our way to bring you images of Chevy van-converted Kei cars, six-wheeled monstrosities and clones of our childhood heroes. You seriously didn't think that the only "wacky" products from Japan were the off-the-wall game shows, did you? Before we get into the meat of the article... As a few of our more "enlightened" readers have sent in letters asking us (in a less than racially-sensitive way) why we are showing so much "Japanese crap", may we present the following rides from TAS: There. That should shut up the mulleted, PBR-drinking (and not in an ironic way) readers out there. Let's move on to the "good" stuff. Every year,...

Imagine a Honda Fit with a hand-built, high power Integra/Acura 2.0-liter Type R engine stuffed under the hood. That was the sensational Mugen Fit Dynamite which debuted to huge acclaim back at the 2004 Tokyo Auto Salon. Unfortunately, such a car was too unwieldy (and expensive) to produce for the road, even for the ace Honda tuners. But the dream lives on–sort of–via this Fit Spec.D which gets the same aggressive fender blisters, lowered suspension and wheel/tire package as the Dynamite, but more viable 1.5-liter supercharged engine. Mugen continues to develop this Fit spec.D for the Japanese home market. Because its 143 brake horsepower engine with Roots-type blower has been tested and developed on the dynamometer (just as Mugen does with its racing engines), it should be the real deal. Until now, Mugen’s been able to sell you a Dynamite lookalike body kit in Japan but not with the 1.5 supercharged engine package in tow. The aftermarketer expects to bring the Fit Spec.D to ma...

We're psyched now that we can finally talk about our favorite vehicles of the 2007 Tokyo Auto Salon: the style wagons. These pimped-out minivans were our favorite part of the 2005 Tokyo Auto Salon, and after the disappointingly small number of VIP vans at the '06 show, we thought that the trend was dead. It turns out that the pimp-wagon scene was just resting, as VIP vans seemed to dominate the 2007 show. So what makes a minivan a "style wagon"? Basically, a style wagon is a VIP-styled minivan. As is the case with VIP sedans, most style wagons have a simple white or black paint scheme (though silver is also acceptable), tasteful aero kits, large chrome wheels and no fender gap. Within the style wagon scene, the main vans of choice seem to be the Honda Odyssey, Nissan Elgrand and the Toyota Estima. Though Americans would look at any of these rides as "just a minivan", the massive size of these vans allows Japanese tuners to let their minds run wild. Though th...

Japan's VIP styling trend is said to be the next big thing in U.S. tuning, so we thought we'd take a look at the high-class VIP luxury cars of the 2007 Tokyo Auto Salon. To be honest though, it's really hard to create an article based solely around these VIP rides as there's not a whole lot to talk about. The formula is simple: take one Japanese-made luxury sedan, make sure the car is white or black, put a tasteful aero kit on it, slap on some large rims and call it a day. Most VIP rides don't boast any wild tuning tricks or crazy stereos... As much as we love the VIP style, we can honestly say that if you've seen one VIP ride, you've seen them all. So in addition to featuring the VIP rides of the Tokyo Auto Salon, we'll also look at some of the high-end European rides of the show. Why? Because we need the variety. Now let's get on with the article. On the VIP front, Lexus' new LS sedan looks like it is the ride of choice for Japan's top VIP ...

We may love the wagons and the girls, but the Tokyo Auto Salon really is all about the tuner cars. Though SEMA may be the "bigger" aftermarket automotive show, the Tokyo Auto Salon is the show to attend if you want to see what the "next big thing" in tuning will be. Unlike SEMA's rows upon rows of parts for 40-year-old cars, the trends seen at TAS will be the next million-dollar industries. Sport compact tuning, tuning for drift cars and now VIP auto fashion all launched from the floor of Makuhari Messe; we just wonder what's next. Perhaps the stuff on these pages will give us a clue... The sub-compact/B-segment has been around for years in Europe and Asia, but these small cars are just catching on here in the States. Notable B-segment cars from the show include Nissan's Nismo S-Tune Tiida (Versa) as well as various high-strung Suzuki Swifts tuned by big-name companies like HKS. While we liked those uber-JDM rides, our favorite B-segment cars had to be ...

We're gonna go against our selfish desires and not start off our Tokyo Auto Salon automotive coverage with a bunch of vans and kei cars. We've got too many van/kei pictures to sort through, so we'll get to those shortly. If you're new to our coverage of the 2007 Tokyo Auto Salon. Now that we've got that out of the way, we'll get to today's gallery, the D1/race cars of the TAS. We usually don't create these types of galleries as... well... everyone else does 'em. Every car magazine, website, blog, etc. will focus only on rides like Nomuken's Blitz-sponsored ER34 Skyline. We've shown that car on this site at least 100 times, but if you really want to see it, here you go: So while we weren't too excited to see the superstar D1 cars for the millionth time, we were stoked on seeing some of the D1 Street Legal cars. As the name says, these D1 cars are 100-percent street-legal, meaning that they pass smog and have all of the original factory-...