Toyota-Lexus-Subaru-Honda Air Filters: Stop The Airflow Fail Sensor Blues
Car or truck routine maintenance schedules vary about how frequently the air filter ought to be changed. Toyota states every 30,000 miles but reduces it to 15,000 for “extreme” driving conditions, which include heavy traffic in hot weather conditions and consistent driving on unpaved roads or dusty conditions. You could possibly tell by looking whenever a filter needs changing, for example discovering dark-colored areas on the section in which outside air enters.

Air filters on most engines are relatively easy to access, and you may check the location inside your owner’s manual when you need help. If you cannot tell by looking, yet it’s been more than 3 years or 30,000 miles, you most likely ought to get a new one. Nevertheless, you ought to be hesitant if every time you have an oil change the mechanic states you also need a new air filter. We’d expect most drivers can go more than a year, at least, and in all likelihood more than two years.

A blocked air filter won’t substantially have an effect on gas mileage, based on a 2009 study conducted for the U.S. Department of Energy, but it can hurt acceleration by 6% to 11%. Acceleration is more difficult to measure than fuel economy, so you may not notice a gradual performance loss. For that reason, it’s a good idea to periodically visually check the engine air filter.

The engine air filter cleans the air that the engine uses for combustion so that the engine won’t get worn out prematurely by having gritty, abrasive air introduced into it’s internal moving parts.
If it gets too dirty, it restricts the airflow into the engine and can cause a loss of power. On older vehicles it can make the engine run significantly richer and with greatly reduced fuel economy.

Toyota Air Filter We prefer the standard disposable filters. When Toyota started using the hot-wire style mass-airflow sensors to measure how much air the engine was using, for the first couple of years, it seemed like every time we saw a mass-airflow sensor fail due to fouling, it was in connection with a K&N air filter-the type that has a light oil dressing.
At the same time, we heard that Mazda had decided that using K&N air filters would void the warranty on mass-airflow sensors. Since that time, we’ve seen plenty of mass-airflow sensor failures in vehicles with conventional air filters as well; evidently if you drive enough miles eventually the mass-airflow sensor can be fouled with any filter.

But it seems telling to me that there was such a delay between the first failures that we observed that were always connected to K&N air filters, and the failures that we eventually began to see with the conventional filters.