Originally Posted By: Astro14
In a race/toy car - cool.
In a luxury car that I drive every day - annoying.
Installed polyurethane torque mounts on the Volvo T5 - very popular among the racer/tuner crowd, and the Volvo is known for wearing out mounts with regularity, the polys last longer, win-win, right?
Wrong...irritating on the drive to work or on long trips...same with performance intakes/exhaust...
edit: depends on the degree of change, of course, but I went back to rubber mounts on the T5 and I am keeping the factory intake/exhaust for the same reason... For a super cool sound, I roll down the windows on the V-12 and listen to the exhaust, but I want to keep the luxury ride/quiet in that car, so no boy-racer exhaust for me (besides, on an MB, they cost more than some of the cars I've owned...).
Look at it this way: Audi could have put that intake on, it probably costs less to manufacture than the complex airbox that works well in foul weather and keeps the sound level low...so, why didn't Audi go with the boy-racer intake? The answer is in the noise level, long-term customer satisfaction, and performance (most of these things add little in the way of performance...).
My brother discovered this very thing with his 07 dodge dakota.
He has the HO v8(Hemi w/o the badge), and installed a magnaflow exhaust, only to find that:
a)the magnaflow made it SO loud he had to wear ear plugs inside the truck,
b) the factory exhaust was pretty much a straight tube w/ resonators. you could see straight through the "mufflers" from front to back.
He put the factory system back on, sounds like a normal truck again.