Stillen grounding kit-50 hp gain?

wstar

Just to clear up some electrical misconceptions here (not that your overall point isn't close to the truth):

The speed of signals from your sensors and to your actuators is not affected by a grounding kit. Electricity's speed in a metal medium is a relatively reliable and stable value regardless of any wiring changes you make to a functioning circuit, and is an infinitesimally small component of the ECU's reaction time. Even if you somehow *added* several feet of signal path between the ECU and some sensor, it's not going to have any significant effect on the ECU's reaction time to the sensor's physical input due to electricity "speed".

Obviously, if existing ground connections on the car (factory ground wires, and also metal mounting points between components) have rusted, deteriorated, or been disconnected completely, adding new ground wires connecting the two points is going to lower the resistance between those ground points, leveling out the ground plane.

By electrically leveling out the ground plane (decreasing the resistance between various points that are all considered "ground": anywhere on the engine block, the chassis, and the negative battery terminal), you *can* improve the accuracy of your sensors. One way or another, most sensor outputs are measures as volts or ohms, and if the sensor's ground has some resistance between it and the ECU's ground, those readings' accuracy can be off.

I still think mostly installing a grounding kit on a factory-new car is a placebo though, unless the car was defectively assembled, or you've made other changes that affect grounding. (Case in point: when I switched out my headers, I lost 2 factory grounding points from the engine block to the chassis). For the most part, Nissan probably grounded everything correctly when they built it

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