Ali Mansour
Brand Manager, 4WD & Sport Utility
More power and bet-ter fuel economy are what we all want. While most off-road modifications seem to detract from both of these high-priority items, a few aftermarket upgrades will help you move in a more eco-friendly direction. Working as your engine's vital respiratory intake, your air filter and subsequent intake ducting feed life to your engine. Though fuel is the other crucial element in allowing your engine to thrive, your intake is the easier of the two to upgrade. While performance gains and fuel economy numbers are negotiable between vehicles, a well-designed air intake system will help the engine to ingest more air more easily, which often equates to improved vehicle efficiency.
To take a closer look at some of the latest advances in air intake technology, we got a hold of two of S&B Filters' new intake kits. Though the late-model Dodge Ram and Chevy 2500 intake kits are unique for their respective applications, both bolt-in systems were extremely easy on the wallet and took around 30 minutes to install. It's hard to say how much power gains we received from the intake systems, but both diesel-powered rides did notice an increase of 1 mpg.
Somewhere along the line the OEMs decided that intake noise was becoming a real issue. This resulted in most modern autos being equipped with intake silencers and airflow dividers. These are often small power robbers and in some cases can simply be removed from the box or intake ducting.
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