4X4 Snorkels: Ultimate Buyer's Guide (you probably don't need one)

You’ve got a useless bullbar, but nothing says bush-bashing bogan quite like fitting a snorkel to your 4X4. Snorkels are, of course, a joke, 99.9 per cent of the time. Here’s why…

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Look, dude, I get it. Bolting accessories to your 4X4 is fun. It gets you out of the house, but not too far from the fridge. And you can appear to be gainfully occupied.

Who hasn’t wanted to take a giant hole saw vengefully to the front mudguard? I know I have, although usually on other people’s cars, like that S-Class parked in a disabled space. Bastard. I’d hole-saw the shit out of that.

We Aussies do love our off-roaders. Hilux was the top-selling vehicle in all of Australia last year. Again. Ranger was next. Again. Triton came in at number seven, and Prado after that. If Bonds isn’t managing to sell a metric shit-tonne of pre-faded blue singlets each month - there’s something seriously buggy about the source code for this version of the Matrix.

I get all these questions about snorkels. So let’s mythbust the crap out of that, shall we? If you’re in the aftermarket industry, you will hate this, and, hopefully, me.

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The only epistemologically objective justification I can see for fitting a snorkel is: you want to drive through rooly, rooly deep water without destroying the engine. Meaning water deeper than the official wading depth of the vehicle. It’s in the handbook, dude.

This is a very ‘Alby Mangles’ undertaking. Like, a Ranger has an official wading depth of 800mm. That’s pretty friggin’ deep. Especially if it’s flowing. 

If you’re a water-driving virgin, it works like this: Driving through water should be a last resort, of necessity, but some chaps think it’s fun. I don’t know why.

Engines are meant to suck air. The engine air inlet in a 4X4 is in the front guard or under the bonnet, up the top, at the front, commonly. If you breach the handbook’s limits and drive into sufficiently deep water and submerge the air inlet, the engine sucks water.

Water is incompressible, inconveniently. So if you get water in the combustion chamber at - I dunno - 2000 rpm, or something - the valves close and then the piston (which is expecting a nice, soft cushion of squishy air) slams insead into a wall of incompressible water. Deafening silence to follow.

This is called a ‘hydraulic lock’ or a ‘hydrolock’ - and it’s going to cost you - ballpark - $15,000 or thereabouts, because it bends the crank and rods and otherwise opens the Book of Revelation inside your engine. That’s bad.

So, the snorkel is basically an elevated air intake designed to mitigate this risk. And if you’re a full-on blue-singlet adventurer … with a lifetime all seasons pass to Dingo Piss Creek. OK - fit one, dude. Approved. You actually need this.

For everyone else: What an emphatic waste of cash.

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The aftermarket industry is so keen to tell you it won’t affect the warranty. But I’d suggest if you fit a snorkel, drive into deep water and hydro-lock your engine - forget all about a warranty claim from the carmaker. 

They’ll simply say: Kindly refer to page 453 - wading depth. You exceeded it, dude. That’ll be $22,000 including fitting and GST. Will that be cash, or defibrillator?

You might be able to come after the aftermarket dudes - but you’d have to prove the product was defective, or the installation was. Good luck with that. Ultimately it could prove to be a pretty expensive creek crossing.

The one advantage of having the dealer fit a genuine snorkel is that, for consumer law purposes, you’ll be coming after the dealer for warranty and/or consumer law issues. You won’t have two competing parties, each trying desperately to brush you off onto the other.

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This is where I’ve had a gutful of the 4WD aftermarket industry and its seemingly bullshit claims. These are perpetuated by journalists who have no idea - or who are operating in a system dripping in bad incentives, where industry criticisms are simply not tolerated.

Speaking of which, here’s an appalling piece (personal opinion) from Whichcar. Whichcar is very confused about its online identity because sometimes it identifies as 4X4 Australia, sometimes as Wheels and sometimes as MOTOR. I guess that really means it’s dependably irrelevant.

4X4 Snorkel Buyers’ Guide - excellent. A class of report I would categorise broadly as: Advertiser suck-piece. Which works like this: You, the publisher, give - let’s call them - a reporter a list of advertisers or potential advertisers to appease. 

So-called reporter runs a few unauthenticated quotes, doesn’t ask any hard questions and industry dudes see their names in print, they sell a few snorkels, hopefully, and the wheels are greased to open the ad schedule chequebook. It’s how the legacy media still rolls, amazingly.

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That’s a quote from Ironman’s product director, Adam Craze. (Not the Marvel one.) Totally agreed, Adam. ‘Australia is often a hot, dusty shithole. It’s how we roll.

So, three allegations there: Higher, cooler and cleaner. Snorkel is definitely higher - agreed. On the other two … not so much.

Cooler: OK, so Whichcar ran the following image to support these claims:

We’re talking about waist height versus chrome dome height. Standard 4X4 air intakes are waist high. Snorkels are near the chrome on the dome that chicks can’t leave alone. (And then you wake up and see your father looking back at you in the mirror, disconcertingly. Seconds later, reality bites.)

Let’s run a thought experiment on this: Imagine yourself enjoying the ambience at Dingo Piss Creek, nude, one day, as you do. Midday, in summer. Just you and the flies and the ants and the snakes and the dingoes. Standing there, all alone, in nature, nude. Livin’ the dream.

Ask yourself: In this rapturous state, does the air around your beer gut actually feel much than the air around chromie-dome? Really? Does it?

Is it a profound difference? I mean, I could see the air just above the road surface being affected by convection off the road - on a still day - but only for a few inches, dude. And let’s not forget, if you fit a snorkel, you’re going to suck that air subsequently through a metal (or black plastic tube) that’s basically just baking continuously in the sun. So what’s it at? 70 degrees Celcius?

And of course, if the wind is blowing or you’re following a vehicle in front, the air is all mixed up and height-based temperature gradients just won’t exist. So to me that just seems like a somewhat bullshit claim. Cooler. Really? I suppose I could be wrong, but I’m not seeing it.

As for less dust: if we refer back to the image helpfully placed there by Whichcar to assist snorkel buyers to part with fat stacks of cash: I have to say the standard air intake location and the snorkel intake both seem equally bereft of dust, to me, and that’s clearly a pretty friggin dusty road.

And of course, if you were driving metaphorically right up the bottom of a vehicle in front of you on a road such as this, your whole off-road shitbox would be more or less equally enveloped in dust. So I’m not convinced on air cleanliness being improved by snorkelization.

I don’t frankly see much evidence for these claims about cooler and cleaner air. However, this did not stop Whichcar from concluding:

That first bit is almost correct, about engine performance depending on cool air. But snorkels typically don’t filter air, dudes. They just suck. Cleaner air doesn’t really affect performance, either, because inlet air is filtered, and as long as you service the filter appropriately, engine performance remains unaffected.

Plus there’s no evidence that I can see for snorkels reliably delivering air that is significantly cleaner or cooler in most operating scenarios.

Big Red is of course my affectionate nickname for Tiffany at the office.But it’s also, more commonly, a god-forsaken 40-metre-high pile of red sand on the eastern edge of a proud Australian wasteland called Homer Simpson’s Desert.

You should go there … and never come back. Peak-hour traffic, solved. You’re welcome.

To Tristan Tancredi, who wrote this interesting report in Whichcar, I’d suggest: Bad example, dude. Snorkels have only one indisputable benefit: protecting the engine in over-the-bonnet water crossings. You’re unlikely to find one of those when you are “attempting to mount Big Red”.

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Snorkel sellers love to lube up and discuss increased airflow. Roger Ramjet’s air effect. Hero of our nation. They just love it. The proton energy pill of snorkelization when you don’t have a river to cross.

In the Whichcar suck-piece (personal opinion) Jason Luxon - the marketing manager for the popular Safari Snorkel brand - offered this, in relation to Safari’s ‘Armax’ snorkel models, in addition to the usual ‘cooler/cleaner’ claims:

Let’s not forget that ‘up to’ 40 per cent also includes zero improvement or even a net reduction. Like, it just means ‘not more than 40 per cent’. So there’s that. 

But let’s be clear on this: Such claims are often presented so that the hapless punter focuses on the number, rather than any weasel-word caveats. The punter hears ‘up to 40 per cent’ but they actually compute ‘40’. And I have to say that engines are generally limited by airflow. After all, the only thing a turbo adds is air.

So, if you could magically jam in 40 per cent more air at highway speeds, that would be awesome. Unfortunately, you’re also adding more than a metre of plumbing, and you’re asking the air to change direction through 270-odd degrees of total rotation. And most of the snorkel plumbing is effectively a convective heater if it’s a sunny day.

Air is a viscous fluid. It does not like flowing fast through a tube. Nor does it enjoy turning corners. So there’s that.

Problematically, there are side-facing intakes and forward facing intakes and even rear-facing intakes on popular snorkels - and they all seem to perform about the same, which is kind of interesting, to me. (Because the rear- and side-facing ones aren’t getting much Roger Ramjet effect, are they?)

And let’s not forget engines typically don’t need a re-map when you fit a snorkel. So there’s hardly a profound change in airflow afoot. And - believe me - if you were adding 40 per cent more air, they probably would need a re-tune. And the stock injectors might not be able to keep up during high-speed overtaking manoeuvers, if airflow were increased by 40 per cent at high demand and revs.

And we haven’t really changed the turbo or the intercooler - and that kinda mitigates rather a lot of what you do ‘upstream’ in any case.

I really don’t see a great flow increase into the engine from fitting a snorkel. Although the designers would have done a good job - in my view - if they just managed not to restrict the flow at all.

If you actually plan on doing the whole Hunt for Red October thing in your fine 4X4 wanking chariot, knock yourself out, dude. Fit a snorkel, and make sure they do a really, really good job sealing it. (Because a hydrolock is not fun - except of course if you see it happen to someone else.)

And don’t forget the engine fan - which is designed to suck air, and which can easily drag itself into the radiator if it sucks water. If you’ve ever wondered how to make a radiator core smoothie, that’s basically the recipe.

And don’t forget the breathers either. (So often overlooked.) See, you can’t actually seal gearboxes, transfer cases and diffs. If you did, they’d pump oil out past the seals whenever they heat up. That’s bad.

So they’ve got these vents, called ‘breathers’ that allow air pressure inside the case to equalise with outside. Great idea - until you park your vehicle deep in Dingo Piss Creek. 

When that happens, the breathers start to suck (because the components cool rapidly and so does the air inside, which shrinks). Thus they suck water, which then gets churned by the gears and emulsifies with the oil.

On the plus side: it turns an elegant cappuccino colour. On the minus side: that emulsion doesn’t lubricate the expensive parts all that well. So, you’d also want to extend the breathers, and increase the oil change frequency for those major driveline components, if you do the deep-water thing.

That’s the conclusion for hardcore off-roading nutjobs.

But I do note there are many more snorkels out there in traffic than there are 4WDs doing the James Bond Lotus Esprit bit, right? And, I get it: generalising terribly, but a man bolting on a snorkel to his fine 4X4 chariot is roughly the same as a woman spending three hours inside a Dior boutique before walking out with the same handbag as Princess Di.

You can convince yourself you’re getting better performance and cleaner, cooler air, plus it cures baldness and helps prevent atherosclerosis - whatever that is. (Sounds bad.) That’s just confirmation bias, dude.

In fact, overwhelmingly, for most people who fit one, a snorkel is nothing more than a fashion accessory. Blunnies and a snorkel - who hasn’t wanted to see that under the Christmase tree? Sounds pretty good to me. 

Face facts, dude: You probably don’t need a snorkel even if you actually visit Dingo Piss Flat. But it is nice to have. You set up your campsite while the sun sets majestically and the uniquely sulphurous, ammoniated odor of aeons of dingo dens - that rich history - rises up.

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