A cold air intake is a system to bring down the temperature of the air going into a car for the purpose of increasing the power of the internal-combustion engine. A secondary goal is to increase the appeal of a car by changing the appearance of a car's engine bay and creating an attractive intake no...

(HID) lamps include the types of electrical lights: mercury vapor, metal halide, high-pressure sodium and less common, xenon short-arc lamps. The light-producing element of these lamp types is a well-stabilized arc discharge contained within a refractory envelope (arc tube) with wall loading in exce...

A blowoff valve (also known as a dump valve, bypass valve or sometimes hooter valve) is a vacuum operated valve that is located after a turbocharger on an internal combustion engine, but before the throttle body butterfly valve and intake manifold. Its use is to vent extra pressure being developed b...

A rotary engine is an internal combustion engine that does not use pistons in the way a reciprocating engine does, but instead uses one or more rotors, sometimes called rotary pistons. The term rotary combustion engine has been suggested as an alternative name for these engines to distinguish them f...

A spoiler is an aerodynamic device attached to an automobile to decrease lift, decrease drag, or increase the amount of force pushing the vehicle's tires to the road surface (also called downforce). Spoilers are often fitted to race and high-performance sports cars, although they have become common ...

A Limited Slip Differential (LSD) is a modified or derived type of differential gear arrangement that allows for some difference in rotational velocity of the output shafts, but does not allow the difference in speed to increase beyond a preset amount. In an automobile, such limited slip differentia...

An oxygen sensor is an electronic device that measures the proportion of oxygen in the gas or liquid being analyzed. The sensing element is usually made with a zirconium ceramic bulb coated on both sides with a thin layer of platinum and comes in both heated and unheated forms. The most common appli...

An Engine Control Unit (ECU) (also known as an engine management system) is an electronic device, basically a computer, that is part of an internal combustion engine, which reads several sensors in the engine and uses the information to control the fuel injection and ignition systems of the engine. ...

Water injection is a method for cooling the combustion chambers of engines by adding water to the incoming fuel-air mixture, allowing for greater compression ratios and largely eliminating the problem of engine knocking. This effectively increases the octane rating of the fuel, meaning that performa...

Nitrous oxide is not a fuel, it is an oxidizer. It carries more oxygen to the engine, allowing for faster burning of the fuel and generating more power. At high temperatures, such as those found inside a firing cylinder, nitrous oxide breaks down into nitrogen and oxygen gas. This raises the partial...

The first thing you have to learn is that there are some important differences in spark plugs' threaded ends, which are made in four diameters and lengths. Most plugs' thread diameter is a nominal 14 millimeters, but Honda -for example- uses 10mm plugs in small displacement engines and l2mm plugs sp...

An intercooler is a device used on turbocharged and supercharged internal combustion engines to improve the volumetric efficiency and increase the amount of charge in the engine, thereby increasing power. The inter in the name refers to its location compared to the compressors; the coolers were typi...

A turbocharger is an exhaust gas driven compressor used in internal-combustion engines to increase the power output of the engine by increasing the mass of oxygen entering the engine. A key advantage of turbochargers is that they offer a considerable increase in engine power with only a slight incre...