If your parents bought you your car and you don't have a job, you should seriously just keep the car stock for now until you get a job or find yourself in a situation where you have a bunch of extra money sitting around with nothing to do with it(like from Christmas gifts or whatever). I don't say that in any way to be harsh, it's just my personal recommendation to you as a 34 year old who's worked his way up from starting out buying my own junky cars at age 17 & 18 to now having a few semi-nice vehicles and motorcycles.

You'll enjoy your money more by spending it on other fun stuff such as going out to eat, buying video games, etc, or doing whatever else it is that you enjoy doing.

If you like working on cars though, you should invest in your own tools rather than buying performance parts, that way you can work on your own cars and save a bunch of money by doing your own maintenance, and in the future installing your own performance upgrades. Those skills and many of the tools you acquire will last you a lifetime and benefit you much more than a few little performance upgrades will on your first car.

 

Don't waste your money on a CAI, they do nothing for our cars but look pretty in your engine bay. There's actually even some evidence that they negatively affect hp. Put the money into some HFC's or test pipes.

 

I enjoy working on cars and I have a set of tools readily available, ^ I need to pass inspection lmao

 

start hustling "legally"

figure out what I mean and you can start making plenty of money.

 

You should pass inspection with most HFCs. Regardless, its still pointless to buy a CAI for our cars. Even with the heat soak argument...all CAIs are made of metal/aluminum piping running through the engine bay....so any "cooler" air that it takes in is going to be warmed by the hot tubing by the time it gets to the throttle body.

 

Z-Tube and either a K&N panel filter or Stillen air box if want to maximize HP. If you want more sound you can't go wrong with the R2C

 

That's actually not true about the air getting warmed by the aluminum piping of the CAI. The air isn't in the intake pipe long enough to be affected by the temperature of the material that the tube is made of. The sheer volume and velocity of the air traveling into a vehicle intake is pretty impressive.... it would have to sit in the intake pipe for quite a while for the temperature of the metal to make any type of significant impact on the temperature of the air by the time it reaches the plenum. Even if it did make a little difference despite all that volume and velocity of the air, the plenum itself as well as the whole motor is made out of aluminum anyways, so that would just have the same impact on the air by heating it up as it passes through the upper portion of the motor. As long as the air is continuously moving at a fast pace through the intake, it won't be in there long enough to soak up the heat from the aluminum.

Our engines will move somewhere between 160 and 400 cubic feet of air per minute in the RPM range of 3000 to 7000(which is the RPM range where you would care about how much HP you have). If you figure that this air is traveling through a narrow intake pipe on it's way to the motor, you can get an idea of just how fast that air is moving as it flows into your engine. At high engine RPM, the air could be traveling as fast as 650 feet per second(almost 450 MPH) through the intake pipe.... clearly that's not long enough for the intake air to warm up as a result of the aluminum intake pipe.

In regards to air temperature, it's more important is to make sure that you're picking up air from a location where the intake air isn't already warm... by not putting your intake location directly behind the radiator, etc.