A few things immediately come to mind after reading your post, not the least of which is that you are lacking a scientific education.

I’m not even going to gratify that with a response.

Here is where your lack of scientific training becomes apparent. You are completely missing the scientific facts of your own analogies. Fact, vacuum doesn’t flow toward pressure, pressure flows toward vacuum. If a space vehicle starts leaking (deliberately or otherwise), the pressure moves toward the vacuum. If your version of the truth was to be believed, one would surmise that by cold starting a car in say minus forty degree weather and then immediately driving it on the freeway, then the cold wind would draw so much heat out of the radiator that the fluid inside would quickly hit minus one-hundred degrees.

Fact, heat flows toward cold as pressure flows toward vacuum.

Here again you are grossly missing the point. OBD-II engines are in fact very precise in their ability to meter fuel; direct injection engines even more-so. As for a clogged injector or an incorrect heat-range on a plug negatively affecting fuel economy; true. So? Given how precisely tuned modern engines are, it only stands to reason that if a plug or an injector (or an intake or an exhaust) is not up to the factory speck, fuel economy will suffer.

Geez, what a mish-mash; not quite sure where to begin with this one. For starters, the discussion here is about fuel economy and not absolute top-end raw power. With that in mind, here are a few facts (like them or don’t):

• Mass Airflow Sensors (and better still Manifold Absolute Pressure sensors) are very good at measuring the weight of the intake air. Last time I checked the worst MAP sensor I could find from the perspective of accuracy had an error rating of plus or minus one half of one percent (i.e. plus or minus 0.5%). Sounds pretty damned accurate to me.
• The computer technology that reads the output of the MAF/MAP sensors is more than sensitive enough to read the output exactly as it is sent. To say otherwise is just silly.
• Regardless of the amount of restriction upstream of the throttle body (be it a throttle body wide open to the atmosphere or a throttle body downstream of an air filter that is so clogged that the engine struggles to make enough power to keep running), the ECU provides exactly the correct amount of fuel for the available air. Said another way, if you put any given OBD-II engine on a dynamometer and then measured its BSFC at say a continuous 50HP with no intake at all, and then measured the BSFC again with the air filter so clogged that 50HP was all the engine could manage at WOT; you’d get a virtually identical number both times.
• Repeat after me, “Restriction is restriction is restriction”. When in “fuel economy mode” (i.e. tooling down the freeway at a steady speed), the throttle body/throttle butterfly provides 99.9% of the restriction upstream of the intake valves.
• More work versus less work. That argument is a red herring. Why? Because has I have oft repeated, the amount of work an engine needs to expend to fill its combustion chambers to any given level of volumetric efficiency is exactly identical regardless of what is upstream of the throttle body. Why? Because the throttle body is where the restriction occurs.

Wrong again. I’ll say it for the cheap seats: Any given engine provided with any given weight at any given temperature running at any given RPM will supply itself with the exact same amount of fuel EVERY TIME. This is not a point that is open for discussion amongst those that understand how these systems work; it is only contested by those whom really want to believe that their favorite product will suddenly make the engineering and scientific communities of the world look like fools for only $100. Sorry, not happening.

 

To put this in my own, short terms.... you two are giving me a headache.

 

Im staying out of this one

 

I will respond to this tomorrow. Honestly I'm to drunk and too tired. God i love friday nights =). Tomorrow I will move this discussion into why you aren't the most loaded SOB i know, if you what you state is the absolute truth and there can never be any other possibly way. IF this were the case and with the right lawyer you could take down every major aftermarket production company that makes a cia. Because you apparently are so hard up on these statements that you claim to be the truth that the fact that companies state that these products guarantee a claim of better hp/tq/fuel eco chiefly based off of volumetric efficiencies pretty much breaks every FTC law ever imagined and in place.

There has to be some truth to these claims and just because where you may see higher hp in one portion of the rpm band but suffer elsewhere that produces a negative or net zero effect (this goes for fuel eco and tq) is grossly misrepresentation of the product. That sir, is about eight shades of illegal.

 

Please keep in mind that "Truth in Advertising" is a myth and there is no law against misleading claims. That said, I don't know of even a single (credible) CAI manufacturer that "claims" fuel economy improvements. To take it one step further, the only place where I've ever heard claims of fuel economy improvements due to the installation of a CAI is on internet forums.

Think about it this way; if CAIs were capable of improving fuel economy by even .0001%, don't you think every CAI manufacturer in the world would be screaming that fact from the top of every mountain?

 

Actually, they often do scream about improvements in mileage, usually 2-3 mpg, but you couldn't prove that by my experiences. I saw no changes at all.

 

Really? During any number of discussions like this on this and a couple of other forums I participate in, I've both checked a number of manufacturer web sites, and challenged other contributors to find me a manufacturer site that claims improved fuel economy; I've yet to see even a single one.

So (you know what's coming next), do you have a link to a web site of a manufacturer of CAIs that has the chutzpah to claim an improvement in fuel economy solely through the installation of their CAI?

To take this one step further, I've only seen a handful of reseller sites that claim an improvement, however, given that most of these resellers are modeled after JC Whitney (a company that will happily sell you anything, regardless of its efficacy), those claims are easily discounted.

 

Myth wow, ok well i'm going to pull a you here and list off sources that clam that this is not a myth and misrepresentation of products not to mention sellers claims to improvements. Granted you CAN and with your apparently non-arguable evidence, sue the seller for these claims. Even if the manufacture of these products may not claim them, the seller does. and if the seller willingly knows that these products yield no benefits but in all reality taxing the engine then that is misrepresentation of the product and failing to comply with "truth in advertising" laws.

Much of the precedent cited in these cases stemmed from Chapter 15 of the U.S. Code, specifically a law known as the Lanham Act. Under Title VIII of the Act, titled False Designations of Origin and False Descriptions Forbidden3, any person responsible for misrepresenting goods and services is liable in a civil action brought by persons who believe that they are damaged by such acts. According to the act, people are liable of misrepresentation if their statements or actions are "likely to cause confusion, or to cause a mistake, or to deceive a to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval, of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person."4

The aforementioned section came from http://www.princeton.edu/~lawjourn/Spring98/cheng.html

K&N claims that Estimated Horsepower Gain: 5.74 HP @ 4764 RPM
and that
Horsepower estimate claims are the result of specific or similar vehicle dynamometer testing. It would be impractical to test every possible vehicle configuration or year in which a particular engine may be used; in these cases, our claims are representational based upon similar engine/vehicle dyno tests. Based upon our engineering experience, we believe our estimated horsepower claims are reliable. (ok so this may be a CYA policy but they misrepresent by not telling you the negative effect of tq and fuel economy which by law could be defined as "hurting" the car and therefore are liable.)((Also to mention that products such as these could be considered "confusing" at the fact that if a consumer were to personally dyno their car after a CAI install and saw a loss in tq and were it was not represented by K&N could also be liable.

AEM Claims on their intakes that:

http://www.aemintakes.com/air_intakes.htm

A cold air intake system relocates the filter outside of the engine compartment to deliver cool air inlet temperatures. Cooler air carries more oxygen, which translates into a more intense explosion in the combustion chamber to create more horsepower and torque. But that's only part of the power equation. Tuning the inlet pipe in length and diameter to match the engine's resonance helps move more air to the cylinders (think of your engine as a big air pump), and this tuning allows us to deliver large power gains. We also monitor fuel trim correction factors and all OBDII sensors during product development to eliminate leaning the engine out and/or throwing a check engine light. (This to you is blatantly impossible due to combustion physics and/or is a gross misrepresentation of their product. Again which they could be held liable for)

 

Seems to me that K&N has the ***** to do it. I'll have to look to be sure, and right now, after a 12hr day yesterday and 11.5hrs today at work (add in 3 rum and cokes,) I really don't care!!
The Super Bowl sucks for someone like me, in my business and that couldn't give a sh*t.
When there are as many people that get excited about the World Series, as the Stupid Bowl (w/o the hype, $$$ and politics) then I'll care.

I know I shouldn't be posting right now, but frankly, I DON'T CARE!!!

 

You're the third or fourth person that indicated they'd seen such a claim on the K&N web site, and that's one of the sites I usually check first. This particular discussion crops up a couple of times per year and I've checked the K&N site two to three times per year for the last several years; not once have I seen them make a claim that their CAI will improve fuel economy. FWIW, I just checked again five minutes ago and they're still quiet on that front.

CAI manufacturer web sites I've checked off and on:

• http://www.kandn.com/
• http://aempower.com/
• http://www.moroso.com
• http://www.roushperformance.com/
• http://injen.com