Absolutely no argument here re: the benefits of supercharging vs. nitrous. I'll take supercharging over NOS any day of the week, if that were an option in the motor I have. We did put a supercharger on the old man's Chevy Suburban to give it a little extra 'oomph' a few years back. Once he passed about 60k miles he noticed a drop off in the power and acceleration. Once we determined his 350 V-8 had sufficient compression (no bad cylinders, etc..) we pulled it into the garage and a day later he had another 30-40hp that made all the difference in the world. Still has the Suburban, with over 130k on it ... still going strong. Perfect application for supercharging.
Uh huh.. That I-6 is a good engine, but it's a dog! My dad has a Grand Cherokee with that motor. Funny how it's slower than the 3.8 V6 Cougar I had, despite weighing about the same (3600 pounds) and allegedly having 50 more horsepower. There's no way valve/intake/FI work alone would make it come anywhere close to a Mustang GT.
Funny, every Grand Cherokee I ever saw had a V-6 or a V-8 in it. Pop the hood and make sure he's got the I-6. (The V-6 is a dog though. It can hardly get out of it's own way!) Maybe I got lucky with mine, but the torque in my Cherokee is damn' good. I've done enough tweaking with the ignition, fuel injection, intake, & exhaust to squeeze everything I could out of it. Some people might say "just go out and buy a performance car" but the fun for me is in squeezing every last ounce of HP out of what I have.
The new Mustang GT's have 4.6L V-8's in them, hooked up to an electronic control trans. It's the exact same motor & drive train (sans a few small improvements) I had in my '94 Thunderbird. Good, reliable smooth motors, but quick off the line they certainly are not. Having owned my '94 T-Bird and '96 Cherokee at the same time, the torque in the Cherokee is far superior to that of the T-Bird. And my T-bird had the same motor & drive train as the new Mustangs.