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Fuel additives and retrofit "efficiency" devices.
"A fool and his money are easily parted". No saying holds more truth than in the motoring world. There are tens, perhaps hundreds of companies out there all claiming to manufacture devices which give better fuel economy, cut down on emissions, add to engine longevity etc. For the most part, these products are elaborate cons. And in some cases, not-so-elaborate. For as long as people are gullible, and can be led by advertising hype, these companies will thrive.
What you need to consider is one very important question : If these devices work, why do the manufacturers not put them on their cars as standard? Surely selling a Subaru equipped with a device that gives 8% better economy than the equivalent Nissan would be a killer sales pitch?. Well the answer is blindingly simple : these devices don't work.
This page is my attempt to educate you on what might and might not work in the aftermarket world. It is a collection of web links, stories, testimonies and third-party claims. You can sift through the page and read up on all manner of devices. More importantly, if you've bought something which lead you to believe you'd get some massive payoff, but it didn't deliver, I'd like to hear from you and include your story on this page.
Without further ado, then.....
The MPT SmogBuster™
Websites : fueldisc.com and/or fuel-disk.net
If I started this paragraph by telling you that a device projected "holographic frequencies into the gas tank and changes the molecular structure of the gasoline" what would you think? Well it seems that plenty of people think enough of that statement to cough up $299 for a plastic disc with some fancy silk-screen printing on it. The idea is, apparently, that the molecularly-changed fuel (!) burns more efficiently thus giving you better gas mileage and less emissions. It's about the size of a US quarter or a UK 10p piece and is supposed to - wait for it - be taped to the underside of your gas tank. The website even helpfully suggests that superglue could be used.
From the Denverpost.com :
"It doesn't work," says Dr. Terry Parker, a physics professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Parker and graduate student John Dane of the chemistry department tested the device for 9News. "It's clear that it's just a sticker and nothing else," Dane said.
What should set alarm bells ringing with this device is that it's sold through multi-level marketing, the new buzzword for pyramid selling. The more of these units you sell, the cheaper they get for you to buy.
The best part of the sales pitch is this section :
OceanCity Network, Inc. is proud to offer a 30 day 100% money back guarantee if not completely satisfied. To qualify for a full refund, the MPT SmogBuster™ must remain adhered to the paper in which it was shipped on..
Great - so if you unstick it and use it, you can't get your money back. However, they add that to test it, you can simply duct-tape the thing to the gas tank, complete with it's backing paper. So even if the device was electrical (which the silk-screen printing might lead you to believe), putting a piece of paper in the way would prevent it from making any contact with the metal of your tank. I also suspect that trying to remove the duct tape from the fuel disc without removing the fuel disc from the backing paper is going to be next to impossible.
The Tornado Fuel Saver
Websites : tornadofuelsaver.com
This thing is known by many, many different names, including the Cyclone-Z Fuel Saver and the Dynamix Fuel Saver. The basic premise is to make you believe that by swirling the air in your intake manifold, you'll get a better fuel-mix which will result in cleaner burning, longer-lasting, more emission-friendly engines, that at the same time give more horsepower.
It's a great theory, and for $69, who could resist? The theory is sound. So sound in fact that carburetors and fuel systems have been swirling the air in the intakes for decades. It's called the venturi effect and it's why carburetors can freeze up in the winter.
John Matarese of the "Don't Waste Your Money" website has a good writeup of a Tornado review. You can find it at this link. His results? Less than a 1% increase in fuel economy. Not quite the 20-30% promised.
The US E.P.A has not tested the tornado fuel saver, but after testing more than 100 similar products including the Cyclone-Z (report PDF) and the Dynamix (report PDF), the E.P.A says it "has not found any product that significantly improves gas mileage."
Let's face it. If these things really worked, GM, Ford, Volvo, BMW and all other manufacturers would be buying them by the millions, and cars would come out of the factory with them on. And speaking of the factory, bear in mind that most car manufactures can and will use an engine add-on as a reason not to honour your warranty.
Magnetic Fuel treatments
Websites : too many to list.
If you drive a car, you're absolutely guaranteed to have heard this claim before : "put a magnet on the fuel line and it will increase your fuel economy by making the fuel burn more efficiently." Excuse my English, but that's bollocks. There's so many reasons that these devices are pure fantasy. Here's just a few of them:
- The magnets are tiny, and pretty weak. There's no demonstrable effect of these things on hydrocarbon liquids such as gasoline (petrol) or diesel. A magnet cannot provide oxygen and neither can it change the amount of heat released from burning the fuel.
- Liquids cannot "retain" any magnetic effect when they leave the magnet, even if affected when within it. Hence you cannot "charge up" a liquid in the way that a dust particle can be charged.
- There is no truly independent lab analysis which could give evidence that combustion can be improved nor that you'll get better power output or lower emissions. The "labs" that give reports and testimonials to the various magnetic product companies are either on their payroll, or received generous "donations". No conflict of interest there then.
- A modern car engine will typically fail to completely burn something like ½% of the fuel it uses. This therefore will be the sort of improvement that could be expected by a device that ensured "complete combustion" of all the fuel. Most magnetic devices claim an 8-10% improvement. What are they burning above the ½% of unburned fuel?
Scientific doublespeak
As with the holographic plastic sticker above, the websites, TV commercials and brochures of these magnetic devices use scientific doublespeak to try to impress / confuse the consumer. A great example is this site : The Magnetizer. According to their site, their device works by:
- breaking up [nonexistent] "clusters" of hydrocarbon molecules, thereby exposing the previously-shielded atoms to combustion
- converting the hydrocarbons to "positive ions" which are more strongly attracted to the "negatively charged air molecules" (assuming that you also install their "air energizer" on the air intake)
- change the hydrocarbon molecule from its para [spin] state to the higher energized ortho state
Yes folks, The Magnetizer's manufacturers would have you believe they can magnetise thin air by clamping a weak magnet around your air intake. Amazing.
The Electronic Engine Ionizer
Websites : Engineioniser.com
This is an interesting device I was made aware of recently. It takes a different, but similar doublespeak approach to making you believe you can get better fuel economy. Their device consists of a jumble of wires connected to plastic blocks which clamp around your spark plug cables. This is directly from their description:
When a spark plug fires, the capacitor block attached to each spark plug wire picks up a high voltage, low amperage charge (sometimes called a "Corona Charge"). This charge is transferred from the firing cylinder to the other non-firing cylinders via the harness wire. These charges cause a partial breakdown in the larger hydrocarbon molecules in all the non-firing cylinders, resulting in increased combustion efficiency. This translates into better fuel mileage (economy), more horsepower, easier starting, less pollution (lowered emissions), smoother idle.
Let me decode that for you : they claim to fire the spark plugs in the cylinders that don't need firing. The spark is supposed to cause a breakdown in the gas left in the cylinder which somehow makes the next fuel/air charge burn more efficiently.
First of all there's the deviously misused definition of "corona charge". That's actually a wire which emits a static electric charge in a halo around itself. It's normally used in reference to laser printers (!) If spark plug wires did this, you wouldn't be able to hold them whilst the engine was running, nor would you be able to have them touch or be near anything metal in the engine bay. If they were constantly generating static electric charge, you'd also not be able to listen to your radio either. So seeing that caused me to want to work through the rest of the description one step at a time.
- A capacitor block picks up a charge from the spark plug cable. Hmm. Well a capacitor stores charge - it doesn't pick it up. For a capacitor to get any charge at all, it would need to be physically wired in to the spark plug circuit. So instead you'd need an inductive loop. Inductive loops generate current because of Faraday's law - it's all to do with magnetism. The brief pulse of current through the spark plug cable generates a magnetic field. The coil of wire sitting inside the magnetic field induces current in its own circuit.
- The charge is transferred to the non-firing cylinders via the harness wire. Actually it isn't. The induced current is transferred along the harness wires to the other inductive loops. The result is a brief inducance back into the other spark plug wires, but at a reduced amount due to resistance in the wiring. The current induced in the other spark plug cables would be nowhere near enough to fire the spark plugs. But lets' give them the benefit of the doubt again and assume the other plugs to spark.............
- These charges cause a partial breakdown in the larger hydrocarbon molecules in all the non-firing cylinders. (sigh). Ok - the charge isn't doing anything to the cylinders at all. The spark plug might be sparking, but even if it is, given the basic design of a 4-stroke engine, there is nothing to burn in the cylinders unless the fuel-air mix is in there. In fact, trying to initiate a spark too early could result in detonation, which would actually damage your engine.
Honestly if this idea had any merit, it would be a lot simpler to just wire all the spark plug cables together so they all fired every time one of the cylinders reached it's firing position. Think of how much simpler engine timing would be!
Sadly for EngineIonizer, there's a reason why engine manufacturers only fire one spark plug at once. Although having said that, one reader did contact me with the following snippit of information:
On the subject of The Electronic Engine Ionizer, you say "there's a reason why engine manufacturers only fire one spark plug at once". As a small note, some manufacturers have simplified ignition systems (Yamaha's YZF-OW01 and YZF-R1 come to mind) which fire cylinders in pairs - one near TDC of the compression stroke and one near TDC of the exhaust stroke. When I did a little work with Kingston Kawasaki (a BSB privateer team) we switched over to this system: there was no power gain, about 1.5 kg weight saving and the spark plug life dropped by about a quarter. I've only ever seen this in 4-cyl engines, although I think some early British twins did this too.
The "+20bhp chip" conversion
This is a great scam doing the rounds of ebay in Europe. Search for "mod + 20 bhp" and you'll see literally hundreds of these things going very cheaply. (Better still click here to pop up a new browser window with the search in it). If you are suckered into buying one of these, you'll get a kit containing a resistor that you connect to the positive line of your air intake temperature sensor. The idea is that it fools the ECU into thinking the air charge is colder than it actually is. So why does they claim this works? The claim is that the ECU will be fooled into increasing the fuel in the fuel-air mixture making the engine rev better, and adding 20bhp to the power.
Of course like all these scams, that's not quite the case. First of all, it's the air which would make the engine run better, not the fuel. That's why turbos and superchargers push more air into the cylinders. By running more fuel, you basically run a richer engine which makes the engine run cooler. As well as that, all EFI engines have lambda sensors to measure the actual fuel-air ratio and the ECU takes this reading and adjusts the fueling accordingly. It doesn't simply do it from the intake air temperature. So if you fit one of these devices, this is what happens:
1. The ECU gets a reading from the IAT, and adds more fuel.
2. The Ecu then gets the actual fuel-air ratio info from the lambda sensor, realises it's over fueling and cuts the amount of fuel it puts in.
3. The cycle repeats until the excess fuel totally destroys your expensive catalytic convertor.
4. The ecu will also adjust the igniton timing everytime it gets new info. This means the ignition map is constantly changing which could eventually cause the engine to knock/pink, but will certainly make it run rougher than a tractor.
As with most of these scams, there's a Q&A associated with them designed to make you believe the device will work. In this case, it looks something like this. I've debunked each Q&A on a per-item basis.
What is this Device? It is a resistor chip that gives out a constant reading of air temperature to your ECU.
Sorry, it isn't. It's a 40¢ resistor that lowers the voltage coming from the sensor. A chip is made of silicon and has many layers of circuitry laid out in it, and it requires a special plug - similar to the chip inside your PC or the ECU in the car.
Will my car accelerate faster with this electronic device? Yes! This is the whole point! It has been dyno proven that this device will add up to 20 HP to your vehicle!
Really? Because the dyno graphs on e-bay are so obviously faked that I'd believe an untrained 3-year-old could do a better job. I'd like to see actual proof of this from a reputable dyno shop.
Will this device damage my car? Absolutely not. Since the altered signal will always stay within the manufacturer's specifications, there is no way for your engine to get damaged in any way.
Yeah - not technically true. You are fooling the engine into thinking it has a cooler air charge, therefore the fueling will be altered beyond the manufacturers specification for the given air temperature, and that could damage your engine.
Like I've said above in this page - if this really worked, why wouldn't the car manufacturers simply re-map their ECUs to perform like this? Or add this resistor to their circuits themselves? Simple - because it does not work.
Resources for the curious
There is an excellent site which covers all the above and a lot more with engineering and scientific analysis of all these products. If you really think they work, then drop in at fuelsaving.info and find out how clever the marketing hype is, and how little any of these devices actually work.
The FTC have a page dedicated to warning the public about these scams. Click here for the FTC's "Gas-Saving" Products: Fact or Fuelishness? page.
The Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A) has evaluated or tested more than 100 of these alleged gas-saving devices and has not found any product that significantly improves gas mileage. In fact, some "gas-saving" products may damage a car's engine or cause substantial increases in exhaust emissions. Click over to epa.gov and put "gas saving" in their search box.
One of the best sources of information on the E.P.A site is their page on Gas Saving and Emission Reduction Devices Evaluation.. Here you can find downloadable PDF reports on everything from the FuelXpander to the sexually deviant-named Analube Synthetic Lubricant.
EPA Evaluation of Aftermarket Gas - Saving Products (PDF)
EPA Motor Vehicle Aftermarket Retrofit Device Evaluation Program (PDF)
Environmental Fact Sheet: Aftermarket Gas Saving Products and EPA Product Evaluations (PDF)
Tell me more
If you've got a device you've bought and tested, or you'd like to know more, drop me a line. The more of you that contact me, the more complete this page will become.