Weather and the 360

Lower temperatures equal higher density air which is better for performance. Pilots are intimately familiar with this phenomena. Hot/humid days equal poor performance. A nice cool day in the 50's will make your normally pathetic gas prop plane soar.

The effect should be a lot less pronounced with a turbo engine.

 

I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary the times I drove it while it was snowing and in the 20s. I'm guessing I probably shouldn't admit that here.

 

Certainly less pronounced with forced induction, but given a sizeable gap (Vegas to Yellowstone/Tetons, for instance) it will still suffer. I certainly noticed a performance drop on my GTI last year for our annual Ravehajj

 

Well this is partly temp but mostly altitude. Vegas is only 2,030 ft. Jackson Hole is 6,000 and West Yellowstone is 7,000. 2K = 19.4% and 7k = 16%. So there is 17.5% less oxygen at 7k than at 2K.

 

True, but bottom line it equates to lower density of oxygen in the air. Which is why i said it's a drastic example of course, but still illustrates that FI cars can and do have plenty of issues with lower density. Certainly requires more of a change than an N/A car would see, but even between summer and winter in MD I notice a fair bit of timing change on my datalogging.

 

Albuquerque is about a mile high, and Santa Fe even higher at over 7,000 ft., so air density effect due to temperature changes is probably more pronounced given the operating ranges of most internal combustion engines.


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