I have a friend who lost an engine in a brand new car. She filled up at a station close to her house right after they opened for the day. She was the second car there. She pulled out and the car died less than a block away, right behind the first car. They must have gotten a bad delivery overnight.
They got new engines, courtesy of the gas station's insurance company.
AnthonyGS said:Knurled. said:AnthonyGS said:Yes. If you ever buy a 94/5 Mustang GT on the stock ECU, you will know bad has right away when you get it. This is by far the most sensitive let's take away all your timing ECU ever programmed. These ECUs hate ethanol too.
What allegedly happens with ethanol?
E10 was all that you could get at the pump here when those were new, and people drove and raced 'em just fine. Only gripe was they were heavier than the Fox and the intake manifold was cramped because of the lower hoodline.
Not allegedly. Drive one of these cars with ethanol in the mix and it starts knocking pinging and retarding spark above about 4500 rpm. It'll annoy you like nothing ekse. On good gas, the engines run without pinging and pull to 5500 rpm like they should. I recently sold a 94 GT here. Ask that owner about poor gas quality. Modern cars handle poor fuel quality much better. I'd say of modern engines the VAG 2.0 turbos are most sensitive to it. I've owned three and they do not like watery ethanol laden fuel either.
And how does that work exactly? Ethanol has a HIGHER octane rating that gasoline...there is no way ethanol fuel is going to ping where gasoline isnt, this is why people convert engines to run on E85...they get more power and less detonation.
Ethanol could cause the engine to lean out slightly, though. Which could cause pinging in and of itself.
AnthonyGS said:Knurled. said:AnthonyGS said:Yes. If you ever buy a 94/5 Mustang GT on the stock ECU, you will know bad has right away when you get it. This is by far the most sensitive let's take away all your timing ECU ever programmed. These ECUs hate ethanol too.
What allegedly happens with ethanol?
E10 was all that you could get at the pump here when those were new, and people drove and raced 'em just fine. Only gripe was they were heavier than the Fox and the intake manifold was cramped because of the lower hoodline.
Not allegedly. Drive one of these cars with ethanol in the mix and it starts knocking pinging and retarding spark above about 4500 rpm. It'll annoy you like nothing ekse. On good gas, the engines run without pinging and pull to 5500 rpm like they should. I recently sold a 94 GT here. Ask that owner about poor gas quality. Modern cars handle poor fuel quality much better. I'd say of modern engines the VAG 2.0 turbos are most sensitive to it. I've owned three and they do not like watery ethanol laden fuel either.
How does that even work? 93 is 93.
I also smell BS because IIRC Ford ignored the knock sensor at WOT. Not that they needed to, the timing was pretty conservative to protect against the guy towing a boat up a mountain in August. Everyone was bumping the base timing up to 12-15 degrees.
Now, could unscrupulous people have been making really crappy swill and blaming it on the ethanol when people complained? That I could believe.
Remember, everything has been E10 here since at least the mid-80s. If all this ethanol issues were real, we'd have seen it for a long time.
Wicked93gs said:And how does that work exactly? Ethanol has a HIGHER octane rating that gasoline...there is no way ethanol fuel is going to ping where gasoline isnt, this is why people convert engines to run on E85...they get more power and less detonation.
They take that into account when they're making E10 and use a lower octane base gasoline so that when it's mixed with the ethanol it winds up with the advertised octane number.
As for Ford ECU noticing the difference I have no idea.
I've had bad fuel several times. Once in my Alfa after filling the tank went about 10 miles and it felt like my motor was about to die. Put in about 6 bottles of dry gas and it was a little better. By the 2nd tank full with lots of dry gas it was fine.
On my way to the Runoffs at Road America in my toterhome I got diesel at a truck stop in Indiana. It was ok all the way to the track as I didn't stop again, but when I went to leave a week later, the truck would barely run. It was smoking like crazy and running poorly, so I kept stopping to top off with fresh diesel. By the time I got back to Pennsylvania it was back to normal. Both times it was obvious that I got a lot of water in the fuel.
one of my fiats had some rust in the tank. I filled it up at a place that somehow had a lot of water in their gas. Besides the sputtering, hard starting, and the other maladies that come from water in the fuel, the rust in the tank took off. It got to the point I was changing the filter weekly till the bottom all but fell out of
In reply to poopshovel again :
1982. Gas station in Alpine CA, filled my MGB on my way to high school got a mile down the road...sputter...sputter...cough, wheeze. Contaminated with water. They paid the repair bill at the local Jag dealer.
1994, return trip from the NC outer Banks. Stopped to fill the tank in some rural station before we got back out to the highway.
Car ran rough, kept stopping to top off the tank for the rest of the day.
codrus said:Wicked93gs said:And how does that work exactly? Ethanol has a HIGHER octane rating that gasoline...there is no way ethanol fuel is going to ping where gasoline isnt, this is why people convert engines to run on E85...they get more power and less detonation.
They take that into account when they're making E10 and use a lower octane base gasoline so that when it's mixed with the ethanol it winds up with the advertised octane number.
As for Ford ECU noticing the difference I have no idea.
I did realize that it could be the shorter shelf life of Ethanol fuel...alcohol and water separation in-tank...that could explain it....though not a very likely circumstance unless it was a gas station that got very little to no traffic or the car sat for weeks after being topped off there. Ethanol often gets a bad rap because people put it in a lawnmower(or car) that they only use once a month and wonder why it doesn't act like pure gasoline...in the end though...its still only 10%(or less) most of the time...even if you mixed gasoline and water at a 10% ratio that would only drop the octane rating from 93 to 84 octane...essentially standard gasoline in a 3rd world country...and they drive around all the time without pinging...as for being lean because of the higher ethanol content...also unlikely at a 10% ratio...Ethanol has an air to fuel ratio of 9.7:1(E85)? so E10 would have a theoretical stoich AFR of 13.23:1....you might get surging and bucking in the standard cruise range if you assume most OEMs tune their cruise range to 15-16:1...but under any load whatsoever most tunes are significantly richer than 14.7:1(when I tune a car...the ONLY time I drop down to 14.7:1 or leaner is under very light load cruise conditions...otherwise the car just doesn't drive smoothly). Of course...this is all just theory, real world conditions and other factors are not being taken into consideration.
I've owned 4 94/5 GTs now including brand new. Go get one and drive it. Keep a bottle of octane booster handy you will need it. The cars hate cheap gas and hate corn syrup. You could probably waste several hours reading about it on the SN95 and the corral.
Corn syrup is probably destroying my M96 Porsche engines as I type this too, and it's not because of octane rating.
Also my guess on why ethanol would be worse is likely due to its affinity for water.
Really go find a stockish 94/5 5.0 and you can live it. I wish I still had one. I'd shoot some video. It's easily audible and scary. One tank of discount low detergent junk with ethanol gas vs. a tank of quality high detergent ethanol free gas. A dyno test on both would be fun too.
A close friend of mine got a full tank of diesel in his Excursion from Conoco. Stopped running that night. He went back to the same pump in the morning and took video of him filling a container with the "diesel". Conoco ended up cutting him a check for around $8k I believe. He had to flush the fuel system, replace all the injectors and ended up having enough left over to upgrade his turbo. Then he rolled the Excursion because he's an idiot and drives it like it's a sports car.
Twice at Costco. Once in the zx3. Ran like assballs and dropped 7mpg from my normal. Once in the Camry. Same thing, same station. I didn't take a sample but I drive both cars for a couple years and never had the problem again since I don't use that station anymore.
1989 East Bay San Francisco, we used $hell exclusively in both of our water cooled VW's. Went to same station all the time, closest to home. Her Jetta got bad gas there, mechanic had to drain tank and replace filter, station paid his bill. We switched to Chevron for the next 30 years unless on the road and couldn't get. Never had a problem.
Google Chevron Avgas contamination. They replaced quite a few airplane motors and got out of the Avgas business.
In reply to LarryNH :
Shell and Chevron/Texaco is some of the best gas you can get. It's disappointing that those gas stations are usually the worst.
Had that happen about 25 years ago. Was driving a VW Fox that was only 4-5 years old at the time.
Spent the weekend at a friend's cabin in Rutland VT. Left late at night to return home. Filled the tank at a no-name service station in the middle of nowhere. Car started running rough, then bucking, and eventually stalled at the side of the road. In the mountains of Vermont, mid-winter, in the days before widespread cell phones.
When I eventually got the car home, my mechanic (close family friend) drained the tank and said it was maybe 1/3 water. Never ran properly again after that and was scrapped a short time later.
In reply to poopshovel again :
As a kid on a trip with the family. dad did in our Mercury wagon in a little station in Morganton, NC. We limped back to my uncle's; and could just barely blow through the fuel filter.
Fast repair; they pumped the gas out into a drum; was full of grit. Filtered it, then pumped it back into the tank to dilute anything left; then sucked it out again. Pumped it in again through a diesel truck filter; drove the four hours home safely. Dad changed the fuel filter again when we got home to catch whatever trash had still come through - and there was, because he cut that filter apart to show me - no more problems.
Forrest in Atlanta
<edit to add> After reading the comments, I do recall dad did always run premium on family trips. The wagon had the 460, and with all of us and the big aluminum car-top box, it would ping like crazy in the NC mountains on regular. Guessing the car was a '74-ish, and this happened '76-ish.
I had some gas go bad once. It stole my wallet and slept with my wife.
I was supervising a night shift a few years ago, about 8 or 9 officers. My department had recently started purchasing Ford patrol cars and SUVs with the 3.5L Ecoboost motor. There was one county fuel station in that district that almost everyone hit up throughout the shift, and one by one I started getting phone calls from my guys wanting to go shop their cars because they were stumbling and down on power. After the second one I started looking for the common denominator and we stopped letting people use those pumps.
We later found it was water in the fuel, but not before it put five turbo Tauruses in the shop and killed one deputy's Charger completely. Interestingly, my one rookie in his crappy Impala was completely unaffected...
Last winter I was invited to codrive a friend's NB Miata in Summit Point Refrigerator Bowl trackcrosses. One time we were on Shenandoah circuit and did OK in the morning. Car was a tick low on gas so he put a couple gallons from the pit pump in. I made my first run of the afternoon and the car was WAY down on power. Only thing that changed was adding gas so that could have been the only culprit. We took the car out of line and filled it completely from the pumps on Main and slowly the performance came back. Danny Kao used the same Shenandoah gas in his GTR and it was running bad enough that he thought the car itself was hurt till he heard about other people having issues. And a white 911 was so spooked with how bad his car was running that he had it towed home.
I owned/ran a gas station for about 10 years. Never gave anyone bad gas in all that time. Any station with tanks/pumps installed after about '98 you are very, very unlikely to have issues. Double lined tanks with monitoring everywhere, excellent sensors, spin on filters right at the dispenser("pump"). All the gas comes from the same place, don't worry about the brand BS. Jcamper
In reply to pinchvalve :
Gas is ~six pounds per gallon and water is ~eight pounds per gallon so water’s specific gravity is ~1/3 greater than gas and will aggressively sink to the bottom.
Fun Fact - The Trieste submarine used gas to provide buoyancy during its 1960 world record dive to a depth of 35,797’.
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