The long version

This was the first Evo Americans could buy from a dealer instead of an importer, and the buyer pool at launch skewed exactly how you'd expect: twenty-somethings financing a rally-bred sedan on a tuner budget, then promptly reflashing the ECU and swapping the turbo. That decade of hard use thinned the stock population fast, so the unmolested survivors now command money nobody paid attention to a decade ago, doubling in the last five years alone. The modified majority is still priced like a used Lancer and still gets driven exactly like one — snow, track days, commutes, all of it.