Quote:
Originally Posted by GK13
Any reason the warm air isn't good for my car like you're saying? Idk why a cold air intake would help me and no one else.
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Well, the default air intake is a cold one. You have to intentionally change something to get a warm air intake.
The reason it won't help you is because your engine does not use the throttle plate. Instead, the valve lift is reduced to something like 1mm and very short duration, closing the valve very early. What that does is trap a tiny amount of air in the cylinder, and then the piston goes down and draws a vacuum against the closed valves, and then on the way back up the piston regains all of the energy used to create the vacuum. This kind of setup should use something like 50% less fuel while idling.
Hot air intakes reduce the density of the air in order to open the throttle further, but hot air is worse for thermal efficiency when you exclude the pumping work part of the cycle.
Your car is very optimized for fuel efficiency; it has a CVT, underbody panels, and Valvematic. There's not much more fuel economy to be had. You can make a trunk lid spoiler, fill in some more gaps in the underbody, cover the wheels, and then the rest is going to be expensive weight reduction.
Underbody could still use some work:
The cheapest weight reduction you can find is probably replacing the battery with a smaller AGM battery. You can probably lose 15 pounds that way for under 100 bucks, but your battery might accidentally go dead sooner. Another cheap weight reduction you can do is get an aftermarket muffler, and then have it welded in place of the stock muffler. I did this for 150 bucks using a fairly quiet 70 dollar Magnaflow stainless steel muffler and saved 20 pounds on my FRS.
The cheapest engine efficiency improvement you can find is probably a bigger water pump pulley. I'm not sure if this will fit, it might:
MWR Underdrive Pulley – Lotus/Toyota 2ZZ Water Pump | Monkeywrench Racing
You might be able to do it cheaper if you take the pulley off yourself, and somehow increase its diameter. It runs off the smooth side of the belt which makes this way easier. If you can figure out a way to add a little material to the outside, that would get you a slightly slower spinning water pump that would save a tiny bit of power.
The only thing that will have significant improvements is spoofing the car into running lean like I mentioned, but that will be quite expensive.