Intake Air Dam

Sep 12, 2004 2 Replies

As I was looking under the hood of my '04 2.5 naturally asperated Outback I noticed an interesting feature. On the underside of the hood there is an air dam that, when the hood is closed, appears to block a significant portion of the intake. It is only a cheap plastic piece. My question is what is this for?? My only guess would be to keep water and debris from entering the air box? I'm a currently removing it on mine and my families to test determine a link to fuel efficiency, but I was wondering if any one else knew of these??



Brian


I removed mine and actually noticed a drop in fuel economy (23 mpg average). Put it back and went to a 24-25 mpg average. May or may not be related. Car is a bit peppier with it in place. I have an 04 obw with k&N filter in stock airbox and have been using mobil 1 10/30 for the past 7-8k miles. I too thought WTF would they block the intake but it dosent seem to do anything good or bad

Chances are it actually routes the air into the airbox from some other place. You'd have to be inside that japanese engineer's mind that day to know for sure :)

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