Here's my initial impressions:
1- The car sounds sweet- I drove ~80 mph with the AWA and was able to hold a nice conversation without our eardrums being assaulted. I didn't tell my wife about the change and she noticed the difference. She laughed when I told her what I had done. She's convinced it's a boy thing. The noise level was an initial concern I had as I take clients out and need to be able to converse with them. That is not a problem with this system.
2- The computer wasn't reset after installation so the chip tried to figure out what was going on. The performance was flukey in the beginning.
3- I had the cats drilled out and I don't know how this may have effected the Borla performance. My guess is it couldn't have hurt.
4- The idle is much smoother. It seems the engine is breathing well.
5- It's been raining here since the install :'-( So I haven't had the opportunity to road test it yet. The computer is much less erratic now.
6- It sounds sweet. It reminds me of my Boss 351Mustang.
It definitely say 'something is going on under the hood.' People
have noticed. One person even stated it didn't sound like a Taurus.
Of course, I never thought it did. I can make the SHO talk when
I want to or I can travel down the road in a semi-quiet mode if necessary.
FYI- mods to my SHO: 26mm swaybar, suspension switch, Yoko AVS Sports, SHOshop airbox, Optima red top battery, Borla cat back exhaust. (On back order- UDP's)
Summary- I'm glad I went with the Borla system.
Update- Hey guys, thanks for your advice with the UPS
station. It's really weird what happened with my Borla exhaust system, but they
found it today. From what UPS said, all though the computer showed that the
system was lost in IL somewhere, they had somehow delivered it accidentally to
some elderly lady on the other side of the city. As soon as I got it this
morning, I went and had it installed. After it was installed and fired up, the
sound quality is simply unreal! I never knew that a small 3.4 Liter V8 could
sound so good! It sounds just as good as a Mustang 5.0 does. I simply cannot
describe the beauty of the exhaust note! What's surprising, is that the exhaust
isn't much louder than stock. It's noticeable, but not enough to assault your
eardrums. Just to make Ron happy, yes I did notice a slight loss in low rpm
torque, but the butt dyno says it feels much slightly faster after 3400rpms than
before. One thing that I'm disappointed about this exhaust system, is that to accommodate
the dual pipes, it sits much lower than the stock exhaust system does and kind
of kills ground clearance. I have a steep driveway, and I heard the Borla
slightly scraping the ground as I pulled in. Also, another thing I don't like
are those huge ricey looking exhaust tips.
Thanks to June H. Han