This may seem obvious but your car needs air (and fuel) to work. The air filter is designed to filter out dust, dirt, leaves, sand & other nasty things from entering your engine and causing damage.
Air Filter – Your Cars Lungs
Over time your cars air filter becomes clogged with all the particles it captures, this in itself can restrict the air flow to your engine. A dirty air filter will cause your engine to work harder reducing your MPG, luckily this is one of the easiest parts in your engine bay to check and replace. Simply open your airbox, take out the old air filter, check its condition and if necessary replace with the new one. 
You should be able to visibly see whether your cars air filter is dirty or not. Though if you aren’t sure as a general rule of thumb the air filter should be replaced once a year or every 20,000 miles, whichever comes first. If you regularly drive through sandy or dusty areas you may need to replace your air filter every 5,000 miles.
Improving Your Cars Breathing
If you’re looking to improve your cars breathing and increase your BHP then you may be looking into a performance air filter. The most basic of these is a replacement element. This will literally replace your original air filter with one made out of a better material. Standard air filters are usually made out of paper, making them cheap to produce. Paper air filters do a good job of keeping dirt out of your engine but they aren’t made of the most breathable material (imagine trying to breathe through a paper bag). Performance air filters tend to be made out of more expensive, breathable materials and will generally last for the lifetime of your car, as long as they are properly maintained.
Increasing Your BHP With a Performance Induction Kit
Are you Looking to increase your BHP and vehicles performance? Then maybe you want to think about a performance induction kit. These air filters replace the whole original airbox with a racing-style cone filter giving the maximum surface area with minimal resistance. The power increase comes not only from a larger volume of air flowing in to the engine but the temperature of the air, the colder the better, as this helps with more efficient combustion. This is why you will find that most kits have an additional cold air pipe that can be positioned to feed this directly in to the intake kit. As a lovely side effect you will be able to hear your engine roar properly, making it sound nice and sporty.
With FREE standard delivery and next day delivery available on many of our products, you can get your air filter in no time.
For more maintenance and repairs advice continue to come back to the Car Parts 4 Less blog and feel free to browse our full collection of car parts on our website.