[Patrick del Poker Grande]

First, let me say that I'm not defending these guys by any means - I hate the ricers with the über-loud exhuasts.

A lot of people sup up their cars to try to squeeze some more power out of their engines. One relatively cheap and easy way is to change the intake and exhaust. The best performing exhaust systems have very little impeding the airflow. Mufflers that are real quiet are very restrictive to the airflow and are terrible for power. In fact, the best exhaust for power would have no muffler at all. It's similar with the intake - a short-ram or cold-air intake will be noticeably louder than the stock intake, but much less restrictive to the airflow and therefor the power.

Now, that's the legitimate beginnings of it. Done right, you can get significant gains in performance with minimal noise. The problem is that there are a lot of idiots that just slap this [censored] on and gain (or even lose!) like 5hp out of it and a whole bunch of noise. These are the same guys who bolt a gaudy aluminum rear wing to the trunk and slap performance brand stickers all over the windows and doors thinking they've just turned their Civic/Prelude/CRX/Saturn into some performance monster on 15" steelies.