I was cruising the motorcycle magazine stand at WalMart when I came upon a magazine, Road Bike Ride Metric. First of all the bikes in this magazine suck, but I bought it for this article.

It contains an article listed on the cover on additives. To sum it up they state that octane boosters, deposit cleaners and oil additives are useless.

It seems that todays fuel already contain the same cleaners you are adding in off the shelf.

Octane boosters are misleading. A +4 octane boost really means a +4/10, .4, boost. Really misleading.

The also talk about oil additives not being needed in todays engine designs.

The magazine has the theory that most of this stuff is based on old technology engines. Such as deposit cleaners being needed in early fuel injection systems that didn't work so well in the real world.

The most interesting part of this article is a paragraph on fuel. They talk about BMW, GM, Toyota and Honda rating the best fuel based on a the given fuels intake deposit rates. They rank SOME of the top tier brands as Chevron, Conoco, Phillips, 76 and Shell. I wonder why they mentioned these brands in the article but not all of top tier brands? $$$? Always have to be careful of propaganda in an article such as this.

All of the rankings are available at www.toptiergas.com

Thought this might be interesting, I have seen a few posts on this subject.

 

Hey,
Thanks for posting this. I found it interesting that "MOBIL" is not in the list. I wonder just how good the techron really is.

 

So basically since I go to the cheapies that I still need my fuel injector cleaner? I just looked up some of those unknown companies and found a site saying that all gasoline is the same except for the detergent they add which is minimal anyway. But I did find a link saying it is good to get a gas card if you always pay it off. A way to get back at those bastards.