Ok, first off, why do you want to do this? You must have some goal in mind of what you want to accomplish.
You bet you have a cold intake on your car, they only came with CAI from the factory. Unless your system has a cover that isolates the filter from the engine compartment, you probably don't have a CAI anymore. Decreasing the length of the intake is going to cause all sorts of problems.
Leave it alone unless you know what you are doing.
Cause what sorts of problems? B)
There is a science, or rather, a math, behind the designing the length and diameter of the air intake pipe. I used to keep an Excel spreadsheet with all of my equations for this, plenum design, runner length, header design and tuning exhaust to the Helmholtz resonance theory, but it is long since gone. Though I do remember that most commercial cold air intakes were never designed using that mathmatical process, most were designed for aesthetical or the belief that the closer to the ground and furthest away from the engine was the best design.
To break it down into simple science, ever bought a pond pump? If not, next time you are at your local home improvement store, stop and look at them, notice how they have posted on them a head height. This is the absolute limit to the pump's capability. As the pump moves fluid, the higher it has to go the less GPM (gallons per minute) it is capable of flowing, velocity of this fluid drops and eventually reaches nil.
Now trade fluid for air, the engine is a large air pump. Do you believe it's head height is infinite? Imagine a STS turbo setup, but minus the turbo. How do you think the response of that engine would be? Yeah, but I'd imagine being the furthest away from sources of heat it would have a rocking charge air temperature. I did the air intake math for a Mazda6 I had at the time, with the 3.0L Duratec, it came up with 2.5" to 2.75" diameter pipe at around 12" in total length. 12" in that engine bay wouldn't have gotten you to even the headlights from the throttle body. Funny thing is, this company called Custom Performance Engineering designed a CAI for the 6, it was the shortest CAI out of all of them, yet it had more than double the power gains of "big names" like Injen, AEM or K&N.
So again, I ask, what kind of problems would his proposal cause? B)
And in closing, maybe he just wants to dress up the engine bay some, maybe he has plans of chroming the factory air box as well. We won't know until we ask, nicely.