Project Toyota Tundra Part 2, TRD Cold Air Intake

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Since towing is hard on a vehicle we purchased a 100,000 mile Toyota factory extended warranty and we don’t want to void it right away so we are planning to stick with TRD  factory performance parts.  TRD stands for Toyota Racing Development, Toyota’s factory high performance arm, much like Mazda’s Mazdaspeed and Nissan’s Nismo.  The main advantage of TRD’s parts is thtat they are conceived using Toyota’s superb OEM engineering and validation.  This means that TRD parts fit exactly, are 100% street legal and do not affect the factory warranty!

The TRD intake has an amazing OEM level of quality, the injection molded airbox lid requires quite an investment in tooling!  The lid is over twice the volume of stock and the air inlet has nearly twice the area of stock.  The intake tube does not have the flow robbing articulations and neck downs of the factory part.

As usual, we always want more power and usually cold air intakes are a way to get free power.  Cold air intakes work by reducing intake restrictions and by resonant tuning.  The lengths and diameters of the intake tubes are tweaked to provide improvements in volumetric efficiency over a useful part of the powerband, by tuning them to provide resonant supercharging much like a musical instrument.

The installation is super easy.  First step remove the factory airbox and intake tube.  This takes a few minutes.

We decided to use TRD’s high flow intake as we have been very impressed with their parts so far and love the warranty friendliness. When unpacking the TRD intake we were amazed with the quality.  The TRD intake uses the stock factory lower part of the airbox but replaces the top of the air box with an injection molded larger volume piece that has a larger intake snorkel, and a huge woven fabric filter element.  It also has a larger diameter mandrel bent aluminum intake tube with a CNC machined billet boss for the MAF sensor.  All fittings for the emissions plumbing are retained to retain absolute street legality even in the Peoples Republic of Kalifornia.  The intake tube was powdercoated red with an attractive wrinkle finish.

Stick the larger air inlet in the hole by the windshield washer tank.

We had to modify our engine cover a bit to install it.  You can leave it off but it reduces NVH so we left it on.  First tape the included pattern to the cover.

Technosquare’s Howard Watanabe, cuts out our cover with an air saw.