[quote=Roy;138557]Not to get into a long debate with you but...

Don't you think that when building the Z06 GM was concerned about performance? Why didn't they use a K&N? Dodge does not have a K&N on the Charger SRT8. No factory hi performance car or truck has a K&N oiled filter on it from the factory that I'm aware of.

No factory performance car or truck is completely designed solely for performance.

When a carmaker makes a Z06 type car, or even a typical family car, there is always a cost benefit analysis that goes on. The design never squeezes out the best performance no matter what....car compaines aim for maximum profit and consumers care about a lot more than just simply performance, even in a Z06 there are always tradeoffs. The Z06 dosent come stock with a turbo either, even though that would be a small % increase in price for a big performance upgrade. Its too much of a pain for most drivers...GM iand the others are catering to more than just speed freakes...there are all sorts of consumers and true performance people/backyard mechanics are just a small group of even Z06 people. There are a lot more stock performance cars with superchargers or supercharger kits than turbos, does that mean superchargers are better? Nope. But they are cheaper, easier to install with minial design changes and are easier to maintain in some ways.

Car design is a composite of many concerns, the Camry HV design is concerned with more than just fuel economy and the Z06 and other performance car designs are concerned with more than just performance.

Most consumers dont want the bother of a turbo, even though its a big performance booster. There are about a million things you can do to a Z06 that improve performance (headers, camshaft, turbos, pulleys) some of which would be fairly cheap to do at the factory, but are expensve to do aftermarket. Sometimes carmakers intentionally derate engines so that they can post performance upgrades over the years without major redesigns. This allows them to spur demand amongst comsumers for next years version of a car. Its very unusual for a first year or even latter engine setups to be absolutely maxed out in terms of all of the tweaks a factory or aftermarket kit can do.

The Camry HV isnt all about fuel economy. If the Camry were just focused on fuel economy it would look and perform like a Prius. Instead on the Camry Toyota spent more on passenger and driver comforts, safety, and appearence of the car in general. That means that LESS money was spent on economical driving, because that is not the major focus of the car, it is NOT a Prius. There are probably a lot of tweaks that cost money that could be employed to improve the Camry HV mileage, Toyota decided that Camry consumers would not want to pay for them...they didnt decide that they didnt work. Im sure Toyota could have chosen from a million differnet engine control programs, and I am positive they didnt give the Camry HV maximum fuel economy at the cost of everything else, they probably reached a tradeoff MOST but not ALL consumers would be happy with between driveability, economy, and power. A single given consumer might want something different, like more power with less engine life or less engine life with greater economy. I wouldnt be surpirsed if a knoweledgeable person could reprogram the engine chip for greater economy with less power and then make up for the power derating with the TRD filter and some other mods for a net better economy with the same stock power.

Im sure if Toyota thought it could market a 500,000 dollar camry HV then it would have all sorts of additional measures that would make give the camry higher performance AND better fuel economy. Just because Toyota did not include all of those tweaks in the current model dosent mean the tweaks dont work. If you think that you are not seeing the big picture.

Ok well theres my 25 cents.....
Tom