Here Are Five Performance Mods That Are Utterly Useless
2. Short Ram Air Intake
First off, the name “short ram” is a misnomer. Ram Air, no matter what your Trans-Am owning uncle says, doesn’t actually cram any extra air in the cylinder past what a traditional cold-air intake would do. The theory, in a nutshell, is that if you place your air intake path on the car in such a way that it takes advantage of the moving air flowing over the car, it’ll use the car’s momentum to pack all that air in the engine, making for a bigger bang and more power. SCIENCE!
The problem is that in order to have this happen with any sort of reasonable efficiency, you have to be traveling orders of magnitude faster than any speed limit in the country. But even if, for the sake of argument, ram air on consumer-grade cars worked, a short ram air intake system wouldn’t.
While it does shorten and smoothen the intake stream over whatever stock airbox and resonator assembly comes in cars nowadays, allowing the air a more direct path to the combustion cycle, it does so by being placed in the extremely hot engine bay, where air pressure is often lower than it is outside, which is a no-no for power.
This sort of intake configuration, in naturally aspirated cars, is particularly susceptible to heat soak and can let a considerable amount of ponies out of the stable, never to return. Sure, the setup makes an interesting induction noise but not much else. You’re better off buying a good panel filter for your stock airbox or, at most, a well-engineered cold air intake that takes air from outside the engine bay which is colder and thus more dense.
Complete list (Jalopnik.com)
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