When I had my former car, a 2002 Altima SE, the first mod I did was to remove the front air dam intake. It was God-awful in that it had twists and odd angle and shape changes, and only had 6 cubic inches of intake to feed 214 cubic inches of V6 engine. This removal was known in Altima circles as the "free WAI" mod. One of the people who did this had his car dynoed before and after and claimed a 6-7 HP increase with roughly the same number in torque improvement. Another member of the site posted a time slip with this mod and with his 5MT, managed a 14.197 at 95 MPH.

So in the early part of 2002, I took my Altima to a lonely stretch of two-lane country road not far from my house and proceed to do some unofficial timed runs with a digital stop watch. The runs were 40 to 70 in third gear, and I made several with and without the mod installed. The times turned out to be pretty consistent, the best being 5.26 seconds.

Since yesterday was a day very much like the one I ran the Altima times with, I took the TL to the same location and made several passes. This time to be more accurate and to avoid any chance of "cheating" the start, I set the cruise at 40 in third first. My results were closer in consistency with this approach and my best run with my TL was 4.89 seconds.

I attribute the .37 second difference to the much better throttle response and flatter torque curve of the TL. At the lower RPMs, the Altima doesn't seem to have nearly the response as does the TL (I'm not talking off idle here, but more like in the area of 2500 to 4000 RPM).

Anyway, just thought this was interesting.

 

Oh, by the way. This section of road has a slight downward angle to it which favors the acceleration. But since that was where I did my tests with the Altima, I had to do the same with the TL.

I also tried this test with the TL yesterday on the same road, about 5 miles further away. that section has a very slight upward angle to it. There my best time was 5.18 seconds.