Buy cheapest gasoline?

Depends on the cheap gasoline involved. For the most part, the gas is all the same, but the additive package is very different. How much of a problem that is depends on your car.

If this is the case, I would suspect you have a lot of carbon deposits in the engine that need to be cleaned out. If you are getting pinging with the gasoline recommended for the engine, it's a sign you need to clean the engine.

Hell, go down to Mexico where people will strain the gas through cheesecloth before putting it in their tank, and where 87 octane is considered high grade. Weird thing, I used Pemex Verde in my '86 BMW for a while with no problems either. Cheap gas in the US is pretty good in comparison.

Try the cut rate gas. If you have a problem with that particular brand, don't use it again. The absolute worst that can happen is that you'll have to change your fuel filter.

--scott

There certain can be differences in quality from station to station. Unfortunately, price is not always a reliable guide. Kind of pot luck unless you know station really well.

I buy at places where I get reasonable prices. I often buy at WalMart because the prices are as good as I can usually find. I will not pay a premium of

40-50 cents per gallon to buy a name brand high test, when my car is spec'ed for unleaded. And have never had any problems with this.

Recently the local WalMart got their tanks contaminated with diesel, and that left a number of people stranded. When the accident came to light, WalMart stepped up to the plate and did the right thing.

On one occasion, I found a Texaco station that was buying offgrade crap and selling it as diesel. I reported it to Texaco corporate, and it was soon no longer a Texaco station. (Texaco lab in Houston did the analysis.) Texaco behaved honorably in stopping this scam joint.

I think you can occasionally get trashy fuel at any station if an accident has occurred, but the events are probably rare.

Perhaps more importantly, Buy from a high volume station.

Fresh stock is good!

Buy cheap but stay away from those rundown places with no names. There was one place in north Houston, Texas, USA, that used to sell off grade batches - like all toluene, or all xylene. But they are gone now.

Gasoline distribution is such that all brands are the same except for the additive package of detergents and so forth.

Basically each company puts X gallons in to the pipeline and they take X gallons out of the pipeline at the other end. Odds are it's not the same X gallons. The additives are then added, if I remember right in the tanker truck or as the gasoline is going into the tanker.

The difference between brands is rather trivial. Occasionally a higher name brand gasoline is probably a good thing to get the additives to help keep things clean but hardly something that needs to be every fill up.

When gasoline prices are going up I often find mobil, shell, BP, etc are cheaper than citgo, speedway, walmart, etc. At those times I get the name brand. Sometimes if it's only a one or two cent difference as well.

My previous example of the Texaco station was on Highway 90 East, near Channelview.

I have owned quite a few Ford products over the last 30 years. My first EEC-IV system was in 1986 and from then on, they have - without exception - ran better and gotten better mileage with the cheap stuff. The only fuel related problem I have had was a load of water from a Shell station a few years back that shut me down - not a cheapie station or brand. We routinely run these things over 200k miles with no fuel problems.

If your Towncar pings on branded regular and is a 1992 or newer, it probably needs it's EGR ports and/or the MAF sensor cleaned. These are common problems. It will only get worse as time goes by wanting more octane because of the additional deposits. Get the EGR ports and MAF cleaned and put it back on regular fuel. There are pictures of how to do it on the net. You will be very pleasantly surprised and rewarded with greatly improved performance and fuel economy. The price of the car has little to do with octane requirement other than the fact that the manufacturers put the higher performance engines requiring higher octane in higher priced cars. Your Towncar is not one of them.

Lugnut

I dont know how this works. The gasoline at the WalMart station is serviced by Murphy Oil. Whether the transport driver made the mistake, or whether the diesel was in the wrong compartments of the delivey tanker, I just dont know. It is not the first time this sort of thing has happened to other brand name service stations.

But I agree, they need to be more careful.

Nope, it was not canola oil. It was an aromatic naphtha from a refinery in the Houston area. But not diesel.

How to make your own automobile fuel

(there is nice ''benefit'' too) cuhulin

I assume that was long enough ago that distribution was different.

The history channel has a program that does a pretty good overview of gasoline distribution as it is today.

You should't trust the History channel all the time.They have been known to get their ''facts'' messed up before. cuhulin

In this case they match every other source including the gasoline faq.

Tanker drivers fill the tanks at all hours of day and night. Store employees don't have anything to do with that. Often they don't even know where the tanks are.

You have very little knowledge of the subject matter.

" " wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@houston.rr.com:

Doesn't anybody check tank levels with a long stick any more?

And they purchase from multiple suppliers, depending on who bids low. They may not get the same driver twice in a row who knows the tank layouts.

They can, but they can't use the numbers to satisfy Fed 40 CFR 280 requirements. So, few people do that anymore. They would also have to use an alternate means of inventory control AND leak detection like inventory reconciliation AND ground water sampling / sniffers.

I had a VW Fox that was pretty picky about it's gas. It was underpowered and inefficient to begin with, so any loss in power made it almost useless. There were times when I first owned it in - about

2002-2003 - when I would floor it and not much would happen. I eventually figured out that there were some brands it wouldn't burn. Marathon and Clark are the names that come to mind.

The GM's I've owned - Tech4 Celebrity, 3.1 V6 Lumina, and 3.4 V6 Impala - all seemed to ping under load with 87 octane but ran fine with the 89. The 3.0 V6 Taurus runs equally mediocre on any gas I put in it. My guess is that the GM's were slightly more agressively tuned and so the could wring more out of the gas.

Calvin