If you let your Honda Accord’s air filter go bad, you’re going to wind up with debris, dust, and all sorts of junk clogging up your engine. That’s not just going affect performance; it’s going to take thousands of miles off your car’s life expectancy.
What’s the best air filter for a Honda Accord?
You’re usually best off with a genuine Honda filter from Honda Parts Now. It should cost you around $20. You can save about five bucks with an aftermarket filter from Autozone, but the cost difference is pretty marginal, so why not just go OEM?
Changing the Air Filter on Your Honda Accord
With a Honda Accord, you should change your air filter every 10,000 miles or once a year, whichever comes first. And there’s no harm in changing it early. It’s not like replacing your tires; these things are pretty cheap.
It’s also easy to do it yourself. If you can change the air filter in your HVAC unit at home, you can change the air filter in a Honda Accord. All you need is a Phillips screwdriver.
- Locate the housing assembly. In most Accords, that’s going to be in the black box behind the battery.
- You’ll have four Phillips screws to loosen. They don’t come all the way out; they just come loose. Once you hear the screw clicking, you’re good.
- Lift the housing. You don’t need to remove it, just lift it up. You should be able to see the old air filter.
- From here, pull the old filter out, put the new one in, and put it all back together, following the steps in reverse. Simple.
You want to be careful lifting the housing as it is prone to cracking. But this is one of the easiest bits of maintenance work you can possibly do on a car.
Does a Performance Air Filter Make a Difference?
While shopping for air filters, you’re likely to see high-performance filters that cost two or three times as much as a standard Honda filter. So all that money has to be going somewhere, right?
The short answer is: Yes. Motor Authority ran a test and found that a K&N filter produced an increase of about four horsepower on overall performance compared to an OEM filter.
Now, is that a big enough difference to decide the winner at a NASCAR race? Sure.
Is it going to do anything for the daily commuter? Probably not.
If you’re building a customized high-performance drag racer out of your Accord, then, by all means, spare no expense. But for the vast majority of Honda drivers, the difference is too small to notice.
And in some cases it might only be producing that extra horsepower by failing to properly filter the air. At which point you might as well just pull the filter right out and get the maximum possible horsepower with the dirtiest possible air.
