BY KEVIN SAWYER – The type of gasoline you use in your vehicle can make a difference in your performance can’t it? Using a cheaper brand of gas is likely to eventually cause damage to your engine? Well, some recent research done by Edmunds has posed these very same questions to researchers and experts in gasoline and engine technology.
Apparently the technology of today’s engines is such that on board computers can make adjustments to any type of fuel being used. So, the short answer is that cheaper gas won’t damage your engine. Most gasoline engines in vehicles these days take the lowest “regular” octane available. Only larger engines and higher performance vehicles will do better with a 93 octane gasoline.
All of the fuel at American gas stations start out the same. It is the off brands and the major oil companies that take it from there. They each add their own additives to the gasoline to affect such things as emissions and fuel economy as well as keeping the engine clean. It is the cost of the additives, as well as pitching in to pay for the major brand’s advertising campaigns, that affect the overall cost at the pump. The higher the cost of the gasoline, the better the fuel additives likely are.
AAA has done experiments in the past with various gasoline types and prices and time and again found no real difference in the quality of the fuel. While many industry experts will argue that fuel deposits and other manner of gunk will begin to settle on, and in, engines if improper additives are used, most research done on the matter has consistently shown that there is no real difference when it comes to the type of gasoline used in a vehicle.
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