People Say I'm Full of Crap About Premium Fuel, Well Watch This

rev up your engines today i'm going to tell you why not to waste your hard earned money on expensive gasoline when your car doesn't need it now i started pumping gas at my father's corner texaco gas station and even back in those days the oil companies they were pushing their expensive high test premium gasoline my father ran the station wondered how company charges so much more for the high test than the regular they actually had a congressional meeting where they asked the car companies how come the high test gas is so expensive compared to the regular when they found out that it cost maybe a penny more back in those days to make the high test than it did for the regular well the oil companies came back with a simple answer we have to get back our advertising because in all their advertisements they only advertise the high test gasoline like in shell's case you see the ads are all the shell v power the most expensive gasoline so they're saying well all our advertising is tied in with that so we got to charge a bunch more to pay for the advertising so of course they want you to buy the more expensive gas even though your car doesn't need it take their recent advertising campaign for the shell v-power nitro plus high-test gasoline they claim it has seven times the minimum required cleaning agents in it but of course they don't tell you what exactly the agent is how much is actually in there now of course they do spend a small fortune advertising this stuff you'll see youtubers out there that have sponsored videos by shell and they tout this kind of stuff but hey that's just paid advertising let's get into the real facts here i've been to shaw laboratories and i asked them about the editors they said scotty we can't tell you those are trade secrets well hey we're buying the stuff why is it a secret and they said stuff like well we don't want to get an additive war well why not i think any divorce would be great if we had cars that ran cleaner and they put more in maybe they'd make a little bit less profit but hey these oil companies are swimming in the money in for the life of me i can't understand why you buy a box of cereal it's got every single ingredient that's in it so you can compare are the cereal companies saying oh we don't want a cereal war well i guess they're well open to cereal awards but they all companies know they're a little more tight-lipped about it so when someone tells you it's got seven times the cleaner but they won't tell you how much that actually is hey take all this stuff with a grain of salt bp calls their additives invigorate invigorating isn't it chevron calls it techron and shell calls it shell v-power nitro plus and then that plus they're the good ones they contain the pea that's the nitrogen-based cleaner which all those additives the good additives that you put in your gas tank they all contain paa you take something like sea foam that i don't like the last time i checked it contains absolutely no pea at all it's a cleaner that was made since it's called seafoam for old fish and outboard motor engines in the 50s there were two-stroke motors where you had to mix oil with the gas perfectly fine for that but for four-stroke modern engines no you don't use that kind of stuff so from what i've read all the major brands and their premium they put in some amount of pea but they won't tell you how much i find that amazing myself because i've been to the labs at shell those things are complex they have all kinds of technology and they can certainly tell you exactly what's in a gasoline but they're not going to they're just going to try to convince you to put their high test most expensive gas in your car through advertising so don't listen to their advertising hey i've got a whole video out there on exactly about the different types of gasoline and when to use them which have been copied by innumerable other youtubers so i'm not going to go into the whole thing but basically most cars these days are made to run perfectly normal on regular gasoline the cheapest stop there the higher octane gas the only difference between that and regular gas is it can take more pressure before it ignites so if you have a high compression racing engine or if you have a turbo or supercharger that pumps in more air which in effect increases the compression a lot of those especially the old ones will only run correctly on high octane gas or they'll knock from pre-ignition but even that's just the case for the old ones you take the new ones i had a ford mustang with that four-cylinder one that puts out 300 something horsepower it told you you could use the premium and you get 300 something horsepower and if you don't use regular it'll run perfectly fine but then you'll have 200 something horsepower instead it won't have as much power but it'll run perfectly fine ever since i was a young mechanic when dinosaurs ruled the earth there's been a battle between the car manufacturers and the oil companies the car manufacturers say you can make any kind of gasoline so our cars will run perfectly fine but then the oil companies would come up with their idea you can make cars that'll run on any kind of gasoline that we make so they're always battling back and forth but with modern technology the car manufacturers basically have solved that problem entirely with computer technology they make cars that can run on any kind of gasoline and work perfectly fine if you take an extreme example the flex fuel cars they can run on any combination of pure gasoline and ethanol the stuff you buy at the pump 10 to 15 ethanol all cars run on that but if you ever see one of those e85 ethanol stations that's 85 percent ethanol the alcohol and only 15 gasoline you need a special car to run on that all the time but the manufacturers have figured that out in that case they have special oxygen sensors on the exhaust special fuel pumps that can take the extra alcohol special fuel injectors that can take all that alcohol without being damaged because alcohol can ruin a lot of fuel parts i had somebody tow me a car i'd been at another shop for three weeks they couldn't figure out what's wrong with it i kind of thought ah let's test the gasoline they did all kinds of electrical mechanical tests but they didn't say anything about testing the gasoline this ethanol testing kit costs less than 10 bucks doesn't cost anything it can test the level of ethanol in your gasoline and you might ask why is there ethanol commonly known as alcohol am i gasoline so here's the story behind it when i was a young mechanic they used leaded gas that's the only gas you could buy was leaded gas and they put lead into the gasoline as both a lubricant for the valves the metal parts and as an octane booster to raise the octane so the engines didn't knock when you were accelerating and not got the lead would stop such pre-ignition but of course as we found out maybe the romans never knew that might have led to their decline lead is not good for you whether you drink it or breathe it in and since it was in the cars gasoline you were breathing fumes out lead is not good so they took the lead out back in 1990 they passed a law that said you got to take all the lead out of gasoline by the year 1995. so there's no more leaded gas in the united states but they had to replace the lead with something so they replaced it with a chemical called mtb and this mtbe both oxygenated the fuel so it burned cleaner and raised the octane level so the engines wouldn't knock when you accelerate especially with higher compression engines now this additive worked perfectly fine at least for the machines but not so great for people because it turned out that the mtbe was getting spilled in the groundwater from underground tank leaks and stuff so that was the end of that they had to get rid of that and replace it with something else and much to the pleasure of midwest corn farmers they decided to replace it with ethanol alcohol that's made from corn mainly in the united states ethanol actually burns very clean and it raises the octane level of gasoline got two major problems with it ethanol has less british thermal units btu less energy than gasoline so if you ran a car with a hundred percent ethanol in it you would get about 20 percent worse gas mileage than you would with the same amount of gasoline because it has less energy and two in higher concentration the ethanol can destroy rubber products in the car really absorbs water a lot so you can end up with too much water in your gas tank so it's got its downsides too but that said the ethanol is in use in american gasoline the most common use is 10 percent ethanol and 90 gasoline look at the pumps a lot of times it'll say may contain 10 ethanol well if it says may that means that almost always that's what's in it now such gasoline has additives in it so that little bit ethanol doesn't damage anything now let's say if you've got one of those flex fuel cars that'll run on all kinds of different fuels and those you can use e85 which is 85 ethanol and 15 gasoline but flex fuel cars that can use that have special fuel pumps fuel lines fuel injectors sensors they got all kinds of stuff so that they can run on any variety of ethanol gasoline mix they'll work perfectly fine but only in those flex fuel cards if you have a normal car that isn't flex fuel do not put the e85 in it because if you have too much ethanol in your fuel in a normal car it's not gonna run right it's gonna absorb a lot of water but really how the heck are you to know what's in your gas tank well this little test kit comes in really handy i had a car towed over here a few weeks ago i did this test and found out that the vehicle had almost 30 percent ethanol in a car that could only run 10 max i ended up draining the gas tank changing the fuel filter and then the car ran perfectly fine and this was after somebody else had worked on the car for weeks and weeks couldn't figure out what's wrong just get a sample of the gasoline take the cap off and i'm going to use this little pump i got in autozone for less than 10 bucks it just goes right in and then just pump a sample out as you can see here you fill it up to water here so this line here's some tap water not gasoline tap water we fill it to the little line there there now it's right at the line there it is right on the water fill line now we fill it up to the gasoline fill line which is the top line here now what do we do put the top on tight shake it up that mixes it all up it's going to tell us how much ethanol is in that gasoline now as you can see it's settling down the line's coming down we wait until it stops settling you need patience as you can see it's starting to settle i'd say eh give it a good 10 15 minutes okay as you can see it's settled out now and it's between 15 and 20. i'd say it looks like about 17 ethanol is it so that's way too much ethanol it's supposed to be a maximum of 10 percent now like i said if you had a flex fuel car that can run on e85 that's 85 ethanol and that would run perfectly fine on this because the flux fuel cars can run on any amount of ethanol from zero percent to 85 percent ethanol the sensors and the computers and the fuel pump they can handle that and they tell the computer how much ethanol is in the fuel they have ways of testing it with their sensors so that it can set up the car to run if it's 20 it'll run on that if it's 40 it'll run on that but in a normal modern car that isn't flex fuel you do not want more than 10 percent ethanol in your fuel and in this case it was about 17 which is bad and in the case of the vehicle i fixed a few weeks ago the ethanol content was almost 30 percent i had to drain the gas tank change the fuel filter and then i filled it up with super with some shell v power gas and then drove it around for a day or two and it went totally back to normal and the only way i would have ever figured that out this is a simple little test kit that's modern technology for you back in the day when i was a kid guys used to race the alcohol dragsters all the time and they had to put special carburetors on because the alcohol would ruin the carburetors over time but a modern flex fuel vehicle it can run on all kinds of combination the computers on your car with the sensors can figure out exactly what's in it and make the car run perfect by comparing the data it gets in the exhaust and changing the timing and the fuel injection pulsing so they can run on just about anything don't listen to those advertising especially sponsored youtube videos that are sponsored by the oil companies that talk about their great premium fuel that everyone should use don't waste your money on that stuff unless you're driving a ferrari or a lamborghini and he already wasted tons of money on that so you threw hundreds of thousands out on those things and realized the truth that in most places there's one place that refines the gasoline and everyone else buys it from them and then puts their own dye in or puts their own additives in the basic gasoline from all the companies in one area pretty much come from the same place if your car runs fine on regular gas doesn't ping just stick to it all cars are made these days to run on that stuff except for exotic cars and don't even get me talking about the mid-grain gasoline there's no reason for that at all even my father back in the days in 1960 said you know we got the regular got the high test but what is this plus stuff in the middle what's even the point of that even he wondered back in the day so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell [Music]

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 1,568,357

Keywords: auto, auto repair, car, car diy, car repair, cars, diy, how to, mechanic, repair, scotty kilmer, car review, 87 octane, 91 octane, 93 octane, buying gas, gas myth, gasoline, gasoline myths, is premium gas better, myth, myth busted, premium gas, premium gas myth, premium gasoline, premium vs regular, premium vs regular fuel, premium vs regular gas, regular gas, regular gasoline, type of gas for cars, types of gasoline, what type of gas to buy, what type of gas to use, chris

Id: fD169YXFVdg

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021