AIT Racing® N3502BMWEBCFH - R1 Style Functional Cooling Carbon Fiber Hood

The hood looks and works great! You will end up with an uneven gap at fender lines. I used a dremel with a tungsten bit, to oval hood hinges, to center the hood. Hood pins are needed, I chose Aerocatch 125 pins with carbon fiber look. If you've never done fabrication work, have a body shop install it. I'd send a picture, but there's not an option to do so. My thanks to AIT Racing and of course to CARiD. D.D.S.

For the money you spend it is a good product. Looks good. Fitment could be a little bit better but with some convincing it will fit great.

Stunning hood, however not perfect. Mine did come with a small crack on the bottom, and some of the edges aren't perfect, particularly where the vents on the back are. Very nice hood overall though, way too beautiful for my car, haha.

I love it! The weave is great, super lightweight. You have to schedule an appointment with the shipping company, which I didn't mind. Just shows that they care about the product being delivered. Anyway, great carbon fiber hood, only don't like the chicken coop chrome mesh, but that's getting painted.

The end product looked great, other than the fact it did not latch properly. I had to put a longer U-Bolt on to it to make it go all the way down to be inline with where it needs to be.

Nice fit.

I am so happy with my new AIT R1 racing functional cooling carbon fiber hood for my 2005 Chevy Cobalt SS/SC! My new hood was shipped all the way from CA to my techs shop here in Ohio & while the box did have some fork lift punctures in it my hood was in perfect condition due to the good packaging job by AIT & CARiD. My new hood was nearly a perfect fit right out of the box! We did remove my OEM hydrolic hood prop before installing my new CF hood since the OEM prop would have been to stiff for my new cf hood. I purchased a nice adjustable hood prop from eBay that works well. The hood was super easy to install by bolting it to my OEM hinges. The adjustments that we made were minor as again it was nearly a perfect fit right out of the box. We made some small adjustments with my OEM hinges in order to make both sides flush with little to no gaps. We also had to move my OEM factory latch system up just slightly so that it could make contact with the built in striker latch on my new hood. The new hood would not latch the 1st time around due to the striker being a good inch to an inch & a half shorter than my OEM striker. My new AIT hood did have an adjustable striker therefore we just had to loosen both bolts & extend out the striker to make it as long as my OEM striker. One thing that has me a little worried is that my new striker is now extended out as far as it can go in order to make perfect contact with my OEM latch system. If I had any advice for AIT on this hood it would be to have a longer striker come with this hood & have it already extended out to the exact same length as the OEM striker for the Chevy Cobalts. Anyhow again no big deal since it was adjustable & now is a perfect fit. AIT does recommend hood pins with this hood to work together with your OEM latch system. So far for the past couple of months I have ran with just the OEM latch system however on the freeway I am getting just a little hood flex which makes me uncomfortable because of this I did pick up a set of QL 38 Quick latch hood pins from quick latch that I’m having my body shop install right now. While I hate the idea of my body shop drilling 2 holes through my new AIT CF hood I will feel a lot better knowing that I have both my OEM latch system & my new Quick latch hood pins all working together to hold down my new hood. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Anyhow sorry for the long review however I wanted my Cobalt family to know everything about this hood. I have not used the cooling panels yet since it’s cold here in Ohio right now so I’m keeping the panels in until spring however they appear to be super easy to remove. There is 3 separate panels and they are all held in with Allen screws & your hood will come with an Allen wrench so my plan is to leave them in during the winter months & take them out during the summer months. I also read on AIT site that this hood already comes with a layer of clear coat to prevent sun blistering or fading & I can confirm that my hood did come with clear coat therefore it’s one less thing to do. Other than hood pins this hood is good to go right out of the box!

Good looks, great on my car, I was a little scared to do it, because I've heard stories of other hoods not fitting correctly, but I was blown away with how well and how easy this hood was to install.

This looks really nice, the only issue I had was it actually didn't fit.

It took my 03 Toyota Matrix from looking like a mom car to looking like a fierce bad a** car if installing yourself outline the original hood on the hinges so it is aligned perfect.