K&N - Masters of Deceptive Marketing
Published on 30 Jun 2007 at 2:21 pm |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, One Corporation Under God, Limited Lie-ability, In Corporations We Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Health and Safety, Branding and Values, Humor.
K&N has been making "performance" air filters for many years. They’re of a different design than the one you have in your car. A K&N airfilter consists of multiple layers of gauze, soaked with oil. As air flows through it, the oily fibers catch the dust particles. When it’s dirty, you use a solvent to rinse away the dirty oil, they you re-coat it with fresh oil and put it back in.
The standard automotive airfilter is made from paper. It’s a simple design. Typically a very long strip is pleated and the sandwiched between two pieces of rubber. Dust and grit are trapped as the air flows through. When the filter is dirty, you put in a new one. The old one is thrown away.
Oooooh, horrible environmental nightmare!!! We’re throwing away… what? Well, paper, mostly. Nice biodegradable paper. The paper is full of dirt. Ordinary fine sand, grit, lint, etc. Very organic, this dirt. Endlessly recyclable.
But K&N has come to the rescue. They’re now promoting, on Car Talk and elsewhere, the idea that the K&N filter is re-usable, and therefore more environmentally friendly. Well, yes, the mechanics of the filter are reusable. But what about all that dirty oil? You’ve removed it from the filter with some sort of solvent. You now have a mess of hazardous waste. What are you gonna do? Pour it down the drain? Pay, in money, pollution, and CO2, to ship it to a recycling facility?
Shame on you, K&N. You are preying on the good intentions of ordinary folk who want to be green. You say that K&N filters are made from cotton, a "renewable resource". Indeed, cotton is grown as a crop. Then again, so is paper-pulp, the source of the paper used in OEM filters.
Your airfilters may improve performance, as you claim. Heck, I’ve used them on my old Brit-bikes routinely. But are they better for the car? No OEM anywhere in the world uses a K&N style filter. ALL of them, even Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, etc, use paper-element filters. Maybe because they work better? Consider this: companies who make heavyduty off-road equipment, such as Caterpillar, have tested many different types of filtering system, and they unequivocally recommend pleated-paper types for use in their equipment.
The idea that the K&N filter is better for you engine, and better for the environment, is bogus, and you know it, K&N. Shame on you!
The above is, of course, merely Oliver’s opinion.
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November 29th, 2007 at 4:34 am
I came across this article when looking for info on K&N products. You make some interesting notes, but they don’t quite hold water.
It may be that every car manufacturer uses paper-element filters, but that’s only because car makers get more money when they sell more and more filters when these cars are being serviced. If they equipped their cars with re-usable filters, they’d have no after market for their own filters.
You should also consider the fact that every time you take a Merceds, BMW, Ferrari or any other car to a tuner shop (Carlsson, Hamann etc.) they equip the car with a cotton gauze filter. Not because they want to sell more filters, but because they want to make the cars better.