Tuned

For most of this automotive century sports cars were fast and handled well, but proved impractical and cramped. Four-door sedans, on the other hand, were practical and comfortable but carried the stigma of conservative, family transportation. It had to be that way; technology seemed unable to combine practicality, comfort, speed, and agility in one vehicle. Today virtually every manufacturer now has at least one four-door stuffed with a muscular punch while retaining and expanding upon traditional sedan virtues. Sedans have never been faster, and their nonperformance stigma has faded to nothing.

Showcased in this tuner sedan fiesta is a dynamic octet ranging from a DC Sports Honda Civic at one end of the spectrum to the RENNTech Mercedes E60 at the other-cars ranging from the eminently affordable to the eminently expensive. It's a mix of six imports, two domestics; six front-drivers, two rear-drivers; one four, four sixes, and three eights. There are modified intakes, tweaked exhausts, increased displacements, optimized combustion chambers, and a nitrous system.

We pushed these eight cars on racetracks, roads, and dynamometers, probing their limits in every facet of performance and comfort. The best part of all is that the techniques used in tuning these cars could be applied to practically any sedan, including the one sitting in your driveway.

DC Sports Honda Civic
AC Schnitzer BMW S5 S
Neuspeed Volkswagen Jetta
Borla stealth Oldsmobile Aurora
Vector Performance Ford Taurus SHO
Renntech Mercedes-Benz E60
Stillen Nissan Maxima
Tokico Mazda 626