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Notes -
A couple of thoughts, as a car enjoyer:
I do believe there is still a modded car culture around these days, though yes, it probably involves taking an otherwise-good-enough factory car and adding new wheels and some other mostly-cosmetic modifications, backed up with some anime decals.
Similarly, I think the younger generations are also into old cars, though, yes, this probably takes the form of low-riders and such rather than street/hot rods. I think pre-1948 cars and such are just too inaccessible by their very-finite nature.
On the topic of taking Japanese cars and modding them for speed: much like with American cars, I believe this came about because the Japanese auto industry actually limited themselves to only so much HP per car, so design focus had to go into the rest of the vehicle's aspects and any tuners could pick up the slack after it left the dealership.
While the Kei cars are like that, the tax for cars larger than that was mostly based on displacement, hence VTEC and the widespread adoption of turbos 15-20 years before comparable American-designed cars would receive them.
He's referring I think to the Gentleman's Agreement among Japanese carmakers to limit their vehicles to 276hp, which held up to varying degrees for decades.
I for one wish it was universal that factory cars were 300hp max. Make it easy and legal to mod for more, but no warranty and no dealership. I'm vaguely shopping for a new car, and most of my picks land around there anyway.
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A word I hear more and more among car enthusiasts is "Special." As in "This car feels special" or "this model is special" or "driving feels like a special occasion." Car enthusiasm is less and less about raw performance, and more about find something that makes you say "wow" when you look at your driveway. That can be a classic evoking a time, an art car that has a very specific aesthetic, or performance mods that you did yourself.
It's less the Gentleman's Agreement and more the emissions and fuel economy regs that all automakers hadn't yet figured out, American econo-cars of the time were equally mod-able. Although there is a big dose of the geographic determinism that produces different car company cultures. America's Big Three were all Detroit based and products of the Midwest: big, flat, empty towns where you could floor it in a straight line any time you wanted and where you had to cruise across five hours of straight flat roads to get anywhere. BMW was the product of the Alps: curvy, twisty mountain roads where cornering was king. And Japanese carmakers were products of Japanese urban environments, where compact and practical had to co-exist with fun and exciting.
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