After about 3k miles, my filter was still in pretty good shape. General consensus is to replace it at around 10k miles instead of the recommended 20k miles. Even though I removed the stock side intake grills, the Radiator Grill Store grills prevented any large objects from getting into the airbox. You can see there’s just a bit of dirt in the corner of the airbox. I’ve seen pictures of airboxes full of leaves on 718s before Porsche installed factory grills which started with the 2020s; the 2017-2019 718s had a recall to have grills installed.
You can see the BMC has just a fraction of the number of pleats compared to the factory paper air filter. For what it’s worth, I found a random YouTube video where a guy did a pretty good test of stock, BMC, and K&N filters on another platform in Europe from what I could tell. The BMC filtration efficiency fell between the stock and the K&N filters.
The airbox cover has a nice rubber gasket to seal to the air duct going to the turbo. Yes, I am sitting in the trunk, or whatever you call the area under the rear hatch.
My master plan was to be able to change the air filter without having to remove all of the interior panels. After digging into it, the best I could do was to not remove the back five panels. The two front middle fasteners of the engine cover live right under the center plastic cover under the chassis brace; so I would have had to hack up the plastic panel substantially. That blue piece of masking tape? It was to serve as a datum for where to cut the carpet and leave this strip under the plastic center panel.
I cut the piece of carpet enough so that the engine cover bulkhead panel can be removed without having to remove the center piece. And therefore, the four side and corner pieces don’t have to be removed either. I figure that little strip of carpet will help keep the center plastic from rattling around.
4 comments
that is an absurd amount of work for an air filter replacement
I’ve heard with practice, it can be done in 45 minutes. If done by the dealership, the question is how careful are they and how many little black cones will they lose. Also, getting the lid back on properly seated and sealed takes a bit of work. I didn’t have it seated correctly the first time.
There is a big intake restriction after the intake filter, just before the turbo. There’s a company “Ragdoll Motorsports” that has replacement turbo inlet that showed great results on the 2.5.
Already have that on the way with a bigger spinny thingy that does the ‘hint hint….’ more airflow part.