Is Top Tier actually worth the money, or is it just a marketing scam?
Pure gas vs. 10% ethanol?
I’ve had some people telling me that the most important thing is to buy “major brand” gasoline, e.g., basically the Top Tier stuff. Shell is one that’s been specifically recommended.
OTOH, some people (some of the same ones) tell me that I should NEVER buy gas with ethanol, as it does horrible things to the engine. I know that the mileage is supposed to be slightly lower with ethanol, but it’s not enough difference in my car to make up the price difference.
One problem with this is that most of the major labels around here have ethanol in them.
My primary car is a fairly new Honda Civic. We’ve also got a 90s Toyota Camry and a late 80s Chevy van. If that matters.
High amounts of Ethanol will corrode some engine seals. 10% or so shouldn’t be an issue. You get very slightly lower mileage with the e-10. Some states mandate 10% ethanol, some don’t. It shouldn’t make a really noticeable difference. Buy what’s convenient.
Top tier gasolines are mostly marketing myth, but some people disagree. However, all fuels are required to have the same base level of detergents and whatever. The top tier fuels add some other things which may or may not be better for your engine.
But, there have been several legal cases about unfair trade vis a vis gasoline marketing where companies claimed that their fuels actually were better. If you pay attention to the ads, most of them say “Now with new additive X” or they talk about how they add special high-tech detergents, etc, but they don’t make comparative claims. If they do make those claims, they have to back them up with science and testing. Some people will claim that the testing is too expensive to make it worth it, but my guess is that they simply can’t show that they provide the benefits. Either way, the benefits are going to be pretty small, if there even are any, or else you can bet the oil companies would be touting it left and right.
Also note that in some places, the “brand” gasoline might be the same stuff as the generic next door. That is almost a station-by-station thing, though.
High octane fuel should be used if your car needs it. It actually has less energy per mass, but is much less susceptible to premature detonation under pressure, aka knocking. If you don’t have a high compression car, regular octane fuel is pretty much identical, contains the same additives, and is cheaper to boot.
Regarding the ethanol, depending on where you live they may not even be required to label ethanol content. Where I am pretty much all the gas pumps say “may contain up to 10% Ethanol” but don’t say whether they actually do or not.
10% Ethanol is not going to damage your car, but it may reduce your mileage somewhat. If you can establish for sure that one station in your area doesn’t have ethanol and another one does, the non-ethanol one would probably be preferable. If there’s a price difference between them, you get in the whole situation of trying to figure out how the ethanol affects your car specifically and where the break even point is and all that. Or you can just buy whatever and not worry about it, which is what I’d recommend.
The Top Tier thing is just an extra detergent package that is recommended by certain carmakers. IMHO, it’s probably more marketing than engineering (Are BMW and others implying their cars run dirtier and need more detergents?). If you don’t drive one of these cars, the regular detergent package in all gas should be fine for your car unless you’re having specific issues that would require more fuel system cleaner. But even in this case, it’s probably better to add it yourself so you know exactly what you’re putting in.
With the huge price hikes last year, our state passed a law requiring them to label pumps with “may contain up to 10% ethanol” signs.
This has also caused other stations to post large signs stating “100% gas, no ethanol”.
So I can tell which I’m getting.
Seriously, it makes so little difference in the mileage for my car that it’s not worth the price jump.
I know that old cars had some trouble with ethanol, but I thought all the new cars were built to handle it.
I’ve always suspected the Top Tier stuff was just marketing. Even their website doesn’t have much in the way of specific performance increases.
But I know my owner’s manual says they recommend “quality gasolines containing detergent additives that help prevent fuel system and engine deposits”. And Honda was one of the manufacturers that was involved in the TT recommendations. OTOH, they don’t specifiy Top Tier gasoline in the manual.
I miss my Gremlin. When you drive an ancient car that never breaks down, you don’t worry about this kind of crap.
But “may contain up to 10% ethanol” includes the possiblity that it contains 0% ethanol.
The whole anti-ethanol backlash is pretty new (in the mainstream anyways), and I strongly suspect that there are plenty of gas stations that don’t have ethanol in their gas but haven’t been enterprising enough to put up a sign to that effect. Keep in mind that a year or two ago, a lot of gas stations were advertising their ethanol content like it was a good thing!
Here in Minnesota, all the oil comes into the state on one of 3 pipelines, goes to one of our 2 refineries, and then into trucks that deliver it to the various gas stations. The trucks sometimes have various “major brand” names painted on them, but in fact they all fill up at the same refinery. And there are many ‘unlabeled’ trucks, that deliver to both “major brand” and cheapo gas stations. They, too, fill up at the same refinery.
So I find it hard to believe that there is much difference between the various brands of gasoline.
Nearly 5 years ago I searched for the people behind the Top Tier marketing program. Turns out it is the Quik Trip gas station chain. See my investigative report here. Reading the whole thread may be elightening.
Yep, but it’s a big issue around here. Oklahoma never went for the ethanol idea much.
Most gas stations I see have either one type of label or the other. To find one without either is rare.
There may be a few places that label for ethanol and don’t have it at least most of the time, but I’d be surprised. There are very few places that don’t label at all. They’re either required to (with ethanol), or they’d be missing out on a cheap & easy advertising campaign (with none). Most of the “no ethanol” stations have giant signs, while many stations that don’t obviously have ethanol labels have switched to transparent labels that are difficult to see. It’s not even a brand thing, it seems to be independent of the type of gas.
It’s evidently a pretty strong market force here.
Gah!!! We got some bad gas a while back in the van (at a Shell convenience store). Still haven’t gotten it straightened out. OTOH, I got some off the bottom of the storage tank a few years back in my Kia, and all I had to do was change the filter & sparkplugs. Good luck!
The different “brands” apparently do add more stuff to the gas in the trucks, but I’ve always thought there wasn’t much difference. The latest thing here is “nitrogen enriched” or some crap like that. :rolleyes:
It’s really hard to get any solid info on this topic! There’s lots of opinions, but not much data. From my reading, it sounds like it’s probably a good idea to at least run a few tanks of name-brand fuel every so often. I liked the suggestion in that article to change brands (if you always use major brands) every 5000 miles so they’ll clear out each other’s deposits.
By the way, if you’re concerned about build-up, I might suggest one of the following options:
Chevron Techron: One bottle per oil change. Available at Wal-Mart and most auto parts stores.
Fuel Power 60 by Lube Control distributors. One ounce per 10 gallons of fuel every fill-up, or one ounce per 5 gallons if you don’t have electronic fuel injection.
Yes, a bottle of additives. In a truck that holds about 2,500 gallons of gasoline. That’s what, about a 10,000 to 1 dilution? Sounds almost like a homeopathic scam. I wonder if that isn’t intended more to give a basis for advertising claims than to have any actual effect on the gasoline.
I assumed that ‘bottle’ referred to something about quart size or smaller. If it was a gallon it would normally be called a ‘jug’ or ‘jar’. And bigger than that, like 5-gallon, it would be called a pail or bucket or tub.
At least, using Midwest terminology.
I wouldn’t bet a single dime against that. And you can be sure whatever cleaning they suggest is something classified as ‘maintenance’, and NOT covered by your warranty.
I don’t know that you’d ever be able to tell - Oklahoma seems to have the most lax labeling inspection requirements I’ve ever seen. As an example, every gas station I visited in the Mannford area had inaccurate labeling of some type or another. Two stations had a combination of labels for Premium - on one pump, one side said 91 and the other said 93. At the second station, 91 and 93 labels were one above the other, like this:
[91]
[93]
[Premium]
A third station had a big “No Ethanol” sign visible from the street, but the pumps were labeled 10% Ethanol.
Related to this, why is the lowest octane in the midwest often 85, whereas anywhere else I`ve been it is 87. Is 85 good enough, and if so why bother selling 87 as the lowest in other locations.
You mean in parts of the Mid-West such as eastern Montana, Colorado and Wyoming (and I suppose the western Dakotas and maybe Nebraska)? It has to do with the altitude. At higher altitudes, the car engine sucks in fewer air molecules per intake stroke and so in effect the compression ratio goes down. This makes it less likely for the fuel-air mixture to “knock”, or spontaneously combust before the spark plug fires.
Since, as we know, octane is (in effect) a measure of a fuel’s resistance to knocking and car engines are less prone to knocking at higher altitudes, they can run lower octane fuels at these altitudes.
