Article by Jason Lancaster

Your Tundra’s engine is generally described as one, big giant of an air pump. To produce more horsepower, huge amounts of air must circulate in your motor because the amount of fuel that initiates combustion is directly proportional to it. Various devices are available with the intention of aiding the engine in ‘breathing’, per se, and subsequently, make the most out of its performance. Cold air intakes, air filters, and superchargers are added left, right, and center just to achieve the edge that extra horsepower can bring.

There are some products out there that claim to be able to improve on the already significant engineering that has gone into your motor. Some of these products, like performance air filters and cold air intakes, work as advertised. These accessories improve performance because they trade an increase in performance for an increase in something else. In the case of air flow, it’s usually a trade between increased engine noise and an increase in power (not to mention expense).

Sad to say, some of these simple enhancements don’t really deliver their grand promises of fuel mileage and horsepower increase. Although none of the cold air intakes that we’ve tested proved to be disappointing, they still didn’t deliver their promised results. There is one device, however, that I feel would be wrong to endorse, and that is the throttle body spacer.

One of these devices is called PowerAid, a product of Airaid, designed to go between the truck’s throttle and intake. It is meant to atomize fuel better by creating a strong vortex of air, which is supposedly accomplished by the grooves carved on the device.

However, there have been engineering flaws that have been found in this product. Using common sense, if it was that easy to add a significant amount of horsepower or fuel mileage, then factories would probably be install this device in the production line. Automotive builders need to be competitive so that they can gain success in today’s market, especially for fuel economy, and not a single one of them will ignore good technology. The idea of a vortex of air that could help air and fuel mix is not really bad, but with the modern fuel injected engine, the air and the fuel do not get mixed until both are in the cylinder just before combustion.

In the primitive forms of fuel injection, like the throttle body injection, when fuel was simply sprayed at the throttle body then mixed with air immediately before being coursed to the cylinders, perhaps a spacer would have more use. On carbureted engines, spacers can be actually of help to generate power. However, the technology in the Tundra’s system of multi-point fuel injection prevents any useful effect from this device. Chances are very low for the air to still be feeling the effects of a vortex when it goes through the intake and into the cylinder.

Here’s the bottom line; I don’t endorse the usage of a throttle body spacer on any truck with a modern fuel injected engine. It’s better to just save money and put it on something else that’s more effective. For instance, a K&N performance air filter costs only half the price, but it will, for sure, improve the engine’s performance and fuel economy a great deal.

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