Quote:
Originally Posted by justpassntime
You don't want warm air always being sucked into the carb, it lowers the horsepower... Yeah those under the hood air intakes look cool but they don't help mpgs.
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When just tooling down the road, you don't need much horsepower. Most vehicles can easily keep a good cruising speed with less than 20hp, but to get that out of an engine designed to deliver as much as ten times that, we have to strangle them down to a much reduced capacity.
The warm air intake delivers less air mass to the cylinder while permitting a wider throttle setting. That makes for better pumping efficiency since the cylinder isn't trying to pull as hard a vacuum behind the throttle plate. It can be good for mpgs, but like always, YMMV.