Cabin Air Filters An Emerging Market

Filter manufacturers can expect to see a doubling of the size of the automobile cabin air filter market by the year 2005. A leading filter manufacturer, Dana Wix, estimates that at that time the size of the wholesale market will exceed $650 million, while the retail market will exceed $1 billion. Cabin air filters are used to remove particles from the air entering an automobile or truck passenger compartment from the vehicle ventilation system.

Cabin air filters have been installed by European car makers on the majority of their products since the late 1990’s, and on heavy-duty trucks — especially in environments where heavy amounts of dust and other pollutants are present in the air (such as construction and mining operations). U.S. car makers are, however, producing and increasing the number of automobiles and light trucks with cabin air ventilation systems equipped with filtration media. Dana Wix predicts that up to 80% of the cars sold in the U.S. in 2005 will have cabin air filters installed as standard equipment. Today, some estimates of the number of new cars sold in the U.S. with cabin air filtration systems top 50%.

Car owners in the U.S. are, in fact, largely unaware their automobiles and light trucks contain cabin air filters, and these filters have regular recommended change intervals. Though often not mentioned in car owner manuals, the normal recommended change interval for cabin air filters is approximately every 15,000 miles or annually. Awareness of the need to regularly change automobile cabin air filters, however, is being raised by repair shops – particularly the fast lube industry. The latest operator survey by National Oil and Lube News shows that over 20% of responding establishments offered cabin air filter replacement as a service, up from 3% in 1999.