Cheap gas and it's effects on engines

With all the talk about cheap gas on this blog, we should talk about how cheap gas can possibly have a negative effect on your engine. after doing much research on the Internet I have found quite a few articles that state that cheap gas can cause all sorts of problems with your engine.



If you had my luck, you've gotten 'bad' gas before that caused problems with engine performance. I probably haven't had an issue in ten years with getting a batch of 'bad' gasoline, but I have experienced the issue before. What would happen is that the engine would either not start, start very hard, or run rough. Sometimes the effect of cheap gas in the tank would make the car run like it was missing a cylinder (in hindsight, the cars I drove ten years were so bad they may have been missing cylinders).

Now to make my previous point clear, when my engine ran rough I had purchased bad gas, not cheap gas. So I know that bad gas is out there, but is there such a thing as cheap gas? According to toptiergas.com, there definitely is. Top Tier Gasoline is an organization that claims to have a blessing of sorts from BMW, GM, Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and Audi. According to Top Tiers website, these manufactures agree with the claim current EPA standards are not enough to ensure optimal engine performance. The group has a listed of recommended gasoline retailers that Top Tier brands as superior gasoline.

But there are others who claim that there is no such thing as cheap gas and that all automobile fuel is similar. For example, the Alliance of Automobile Manufactures, an automotive trade group, conducts a bi-annual study of automobile fuels and "hasn't identified any quality differences based on geography or brand," says Alliance spokesman Charles Territo. But, he adds, "That's not to say that certain vehicles won't perform better with certain fuels."

Based on the information on hand, no one believes that there is a 'cheap gas', or sub par fuel out there. What groups like the Alliance of Automobile Manufactures and Top Tier argue about is whether or not there is a 'superior' gas available to consumers, and whether or not it is worth the extra money.

Where's the Cheap Gas At?