Buying a car can be great fun, but no matter how good your new vehicle is, there is always room for improvement. Aftermarket exhaust systems are a good place to start. A lot of car and truck manufacturers leave room for people to improve, or devalue their products. That’s not to say the original vehicle isn’t good, but in America, we always want to better cars for our money.

One of the easiest and cheapest upgrades to a car is a new exhaust system. Sadly, many people add exhausts to cars that don’t need them. For example, an upgraded muffler on a Dodge Neon will not give your car any power advantage. A performance exhaust can free up some of the power in your engine by allowing the gases to escape a bit easier. When the gases can escape, your engine runs smoother.

The Right Exhaust For The Right Car

Anyway, when the exhaust flows better, the fuel and air exit the combustion chamber faster and new fuel and air can be burned to create more power. Hence, a performance exhaust system can help your car perform better.

This works well for certain cars, but for some, the only effect that a bigger exhaust has is more noise. Putting a performance exhaust on a 1.8-liter Honda Civic won’t help the power all the much, but can make it sound like a lawnmower.

Your car exhaust pipe is probably the last thing you think of when you consider upgrading your car’s stock parts. Factory installed exhaust systems aren’t sexy, especially next to a new subwoofer, tinted windows, or custom wheels. In fact, generally speaking, if anybody does notice your car’s exhaust system, there’s probably something wrong with it. But a good muffler shop can help you make the best choices for aftermarket parts. This includes whether or not an aftermarket exhaust system is right for your car.

A Noise Canceling Muffler

Reason number one most people want to visit a muffler shop is to repair or replace an exhaust part. After all, the muffler parts of exhaust systems do just like the name suggests: they muffle the sound your car makes. If the exhaust manifold is damaged you’ll know, and so will your neighbors.

Internal combustion engines are literally designed to contain hundreds of small explosions each minute, and the bulk of the sound of these explosions flows outside a car through its tailpipe. Any exhaust shop will offer ways to mitigate this noise, with mufflers designed to counter each sound wave coming out of the engine, by bounding an inverse sound wave back at it. In this way, mufflers dissipate sound much the same way as noise canceling headphones.

Add More Power To Your Car

It almost sounds backwards, but an aftermarket exhaust system may actually increase your vehicle’s horsepower up to ten percent or more! Why? Because, just like it sounds, your car exhaust pipe releases exhaust, the waste gases released by your engine’s combustion. The more efficiently that exhaust is cleared from the engine cylinder, the more room is left over for fuel and air intake. Only when your car can maximize the amount of fuel and air can it optimize the power of internal combustion. Stock tailpipes may do a decent job at quickly venting exhaust, but you’ll need to visit an exhaust shop to find the type of high-performance mufflers that give your power a boost.

Improve Your Fuel Mileage

For similar reasons, it’s also true you should visit a muffler shop to improve your ride’s fuel economy. Because the amount of fuel injected into an engine cylinder is directed by the gas pedal, not the amount of room in the cylinder — the same amount of fuel will be used either way. So when you have an efficient exhaust system increasing the horsepower from a single instance of combustion, you literally get more bang out of every buck worth of fuel. Therefore, each turn of the engine will get you a little farther down the road, allowing you to use less fuel in the long run.

Replace What You Want Replaced

Now, if you go to a muffler shop just to replace your muffler and tail pipe, you might only see cosmetic improvements of an axle-back exhaust system, meaning factor parts are only exchanged to the rear of the rear axle. But most exhaust system efficiency requires at least a cat-back system, meaning the aftermarket exhaust replaces the exhaust system from the catalytic converter back, thereby affecting more of the engine’s efficiency. To get the best results installing aftermarket exhaust in Las Vegas, consider a header-back system, which replaces all factory parts with aftermarket exhaust parts.

Is An Aftermarket Exhaust System Worth It?

Choose the correct aftermarket exhaust system, and you’ll see increases in both looks and performance with a single trip to the muffler shop. You just need to make it the right muffler shop.