We know the enthusiasts here on Cool Fords love their cars. In fact, over 3,000 motor heads have listed their own Ford vehicles on our Rides Page. Nearly every one of those user-submitted rides has been customized in some way.
Fans are showing off builds, repairs, improvements and you can tell some have invested significant money in their personal vehicles to make them look cooler, go faster and perform better on the road. We’ve compiled a short list of the three most common upgrades made by our enthusiasts.
1. Cold Air Intake System
Probably the best bang for your buck upgrade that’s why. Swapping out your restricted stock intake is fairly easy and replacing it with an aftermarket cold air intake can bring a pleasant bump in power to your ride. Aside from the performance benefits, a cold air intake upgrade can bring a slight increase to your gas mileage, as long as you’re able to resist the urge to floor it all the time.
So do you need a new intake? Literally hundreds of online performance sites offer a wide variety of tuning parts and depending on the retail outlet it can be quite cumbersome to find the right part for your vehicle. It is very important for the online shops to have a good searching feature, where you can search by vehicle, model, year, product or brand. For example, when I searched for an air intake by K&N, I quickly found the right item atCARiD.com. They have an easy to navigate site with all kinds of other car upgrades including exterior and interior improvement, performance and styling modifications. But what really impressed me, is the selection of high-quality and detailed pictures for each specific product they carry.
The cold air intake upgrade is not very expensive with pricing starting from several dollars to several hundreds, you can see why most of our enthusiasts here have a cold air intake installed. Of course, different brands offer different quality, but a reasonable air intake costs around couple of hundred bucks.
2. Projector Headlights
Next up, this upgrade is all about style and function. Let me guess, since there’s a fair amount of Ford vehicles older than 5 years here, I would say most of those headlight lenses were caked yellow and started to look awful. At least that’s what happened to my 1994 Mustang GT a few years back. I got tired of those cleaners that promised crystal clear results only to fall way short of working.
If that’s not reason enough, then my other guess would be that brightness of older stock headlights are no better than today’s iPhone flashlight. New projector LED bulb technology allow you to go very bright which ensures additional safety while illuminating everything in front of you.
3. Sports Exhaust System
Lastly, without going under the hood and breaking the bank, another upgrade that a majority of our Ford enthusiasts did included a new sports exhaust system. Improvements to sound and performance was a no brainer. A complete exhaust system from the manifolds to the mufflers can add a significant horsepower improvement. One of the most popular brands on the market is Magnaflow offering not only mufflers, but entire exhaust systems for almost all Ford models.
The pricing can start around $150 and goes up to $2,500 for the most expensive items. Typically, depending on the budget, most of our enthusiasts here opted for a muffler upgrade because it significantly changes the sound of the vehicle with modest horsepower gains.
What mods are you planning on doing? I recommend browsing our Rides Page to get ideas or doing your research by reading user reviews on CARiD or the other internet retailer websites.