factory intake question
 

What's with that giant from wat I'm guessing silencer that is plugged into the side of the air box? Anyone removed it and seen a diff? Thought about running a tube from that hole to maybe the bottom of the bumper??? Create a lil ram air or cold air action? Lol also anyone seen anything good out of a k&n drop in filters for these cars as far as mileage or power?

I have no idea how removing the box would effect the car, but as far as K&N filters go, I feel they're a complete waste of money.

That box pulls fresh air into the intake. Relocating the tubing under the guise of wishful thinking that there is enough "Ran" effect of driving through air to be useful for any increase in performance is pretty much a waste of money and time.
The car is a very nice performing economy car and is doing it's level best to give what it can and designed to do.
I kinda wish thee were an affordable set of cams for mine. There isn't. Oh well, it is what it is.

I believe your confusing the air box with the detachable silencer that is connected to the left side. This piece has no inlet. I have no plans on removing the factory air box. I only ask Cruz some vehicles that have silencers like these have been known to gain some throttle response by removing the silencer and plugging the hole. But obviously not all vehicles will benefit like that.
In retrospect I did remove it last weekend and have noticed nothing in the cars driveability. Buuuut does have a louder throatier sound throughout the power band :) always a plus

No, not really, the filter on my Saturn, has duct work to bring fresh air from and outside source directly into the filter box. While not all the cars and that is more than a few that I have owned manufactured with some kind of filter package on them rather than just sitting a round filter in a can on top of the engine and letting hot air under the hood in, pretty much all had ducting to either under the fender or behind the grill or head lights to vent fresh air into the engine.
While most of them had a some what tourturise

Yes the airbox has a snorkal to the fender. Again not wat I am referring too.....

Then I guess I have no idea what you are talking about, but what ever it is, it does not sound as if playing around with it is worth a whole lot of time and effort, but then again removing it if I understand your post correctly that is what you did, proved that.

I've been running the K&N filter in My car for over a year. Performance-wise? Meh. Nothing noticeable, but then my engine was already pretty tired when I installed it. We'll see after the rebuild.

I like the K&N only because it's cleanable, reusable, and it filters the air pretty well. They are used in helicopter intakes under the name AFS and they flow much better than older power robbing particle separator systems used on helicopter turbine engines. If it's good enough for a million $ turbine engine, it's good enough for my humble little SC2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance

It is there to dampen any resonances that naturally occur in the air intake system.
As you have found, there's not much to gain by removing it, other than making your intake louder and having peaks of noise at resonances of the air intake system.

There are an awful lot of "Performance Enhancement " products on the market cleverly advertised with the words "Up To" inserted as to part of the claims of increased performance and many of them actually can be measurable in the arena of "Up To" categories providing of course that you actually had the capability of measuring things and you were running in that particular arena. But in most cases the words up to can be equated to the following.
Not with in your life time.
K&N filters have an application but they are generally at a HP level that there are no other aftermarket parts available for that can be applied to an S series engine for example.
Which is a bit like saying that a particular engine, it makes no difference whose in today's market, that it can run on 87 octane and develop up to (some large amount of) HP, which implies that the claimed HP can be developed while running on 87 octane. And in general also lets it run some form of "up to" fuel economy while doing all of this.
It makes good press and great bragging rights but it ain't agonna happen all at the same time.
"Up To" is the great performance fudge factor.
I don't even use 87 octane in my leaf blower.