Comment by efilife

To further elucidate, it's a contraction of "rice burner," suggesting the vehicle uses rice as fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

As Wikipedia relates, "rice burning" refers to a technique of clearing the roots of a rice paddy with fire after a harvest, a bit like slash-and-burn in forestry, and "rice burner" was indeed used as a slur against East Asian people in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

However, simlevesque is not wrong—the term is not usually used in the modding community in a bigoted manner, despite its obvious past association with bigotry. Rather, because Japanese cars were affordable, modding them was seen as cheap, so a car enthusiast with a modded Japanese car was considered a wannabe or imposter, especially if the modifications made their car superficially resemble traits associated with expensive American and European muscle cars, such as extra tailpipes or a louder engine. The ultimate vehicle for these modding jobs was the Honda Civic, which was plentiful and had lots of kits made for it; when Honda released the high-performance Type R edition street racers were quick to expand the "R" to "Rice" (only a mild alteration of the intended meaning, which was something like "Racetrack-worthy.")

In computing, the jargon of "ricing" or "being a ricer" carries a slight air of self-deprecation because front-end customization enthusiasts recognize their endeavors are shallow—many of them can barely administrate the Arch Linux installs they've set up, and almost none of them actually do any programming. The heart of this community remains 4chan's /g/ board, though arguably Reddit owes its entire existence to such people.