In the mid-2000s, if you heard the name Mitsubishi , your brain probably jumped to two things: a Lancer Evolution spraying gravel sideways on a rally stage, or a lifted Pajero chewing through mud in the desert. Mitsubishi built its street cred on hardcore, go-anywhere machines. But back home in Japan’s domestic market (JDM), a completely different trend was taking over the streets. Japanese drivers didn't always want to pretend they were going camping on the weekend. Instead, a lot of them wanted a car that could carry the whole family and look like it belonged at an late-night car meet. They wanted low-slung stances, aggressive front grilles, and proper street presence. Enter the Roadest badge. Rather than giving their vans and crossovers lifted suspensions and knobby off-road tires, Mitsubishi did the exact opposite. They took practical, everyday haulers—most famously the boxy Delica D:5—and slapped a factory-backed urban street makeover on them. The resu...
For decades, a small crimson emblem has served as the universal symbol for Honda’s absolute peak performance. The "Type R" designation represents a purist philosophy: minimizing weight, maximizing high-revving power, and optimizing track handling. However, before this iconic badge reshaped the automotive world, Honda spent years sharpening its teeth on a different breed of performance cars. The Prelude to Racing: The "Road Sailing" RS Badge To truly understand Honda’s performance hierarchy, one must look back to 1974, when a unique two-letter badge appeared on the first-generation Civic. While most automotive manufacturers utilize the "RS" moniker to denote "Rally Sport" or "Racing Sport," Honda took a distinctly Japanese approach, declaring that RS stood for "Road Sailing." Introduced during the global fuel crisis of the 1970s, Honda avoided aggressive track-focused marketing. Instead, the Civic RS was engineered to give driv...