Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. From the June issue of Car and Driver The key to any hustle is a believable story.
View Photos. Best and Worst MPG. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. More From Features. It contains everything from butane four carbons to decane 10 carbons. There are 35 isomers of nonane and 75 different, misshapen, isomers of decane. Good luck lining them all up…. The first problem with these things is that the air going into your combustion chamber is already turbulent enough.
Restricting the airflow hurts performance and economy. Look at racing — one of the best ways to limit engine performance is to require all vehicles to fit a specific sized inlet air restrictor.
Anyone who sells a miracle fuel saver is basically praying on vulnerable, gullible people who have no technical knowledge. Look at the evidence: every day around the world, thousands of engineers and technicians go to work in the car industry, in engine development centres. Their job is to get the next generation of engines together — basically to boost fuel efficiency and deliver increased performance, which are flipsides of the same engineering coin.
Their counterparts in design are looking at every conceivable way to slash weight using better construction techniques and hi-tech materials. Each company, Toyota, Honda, the Volkswagen Group, etc. The car industry is tremendously competitive. CarAdvice Advice.
John Cadogan. We gassed up the trucks, installed our gas-savers and repeated the tests. We didn't check for emissions, figuring most people who buy these products are fighting a holding action on their wallets, not on the environment. Here are the gadgets and how they performed. There are dozens of fuel-line magnets on the market. We tested two. They all make similar claims: substantial improvements in fuel economy, reduced emissions and increased horsepower.
According to the people selling these devices, as gasoline flows past the magnet, the magnetic field will "break apart clusters of fuel molecules so gas burns more efficiently. But wait, there's more. If the fuel line is steel, as many are, the lines of magnetic flux will follow the fuel-line walls instead of passing through the fuel.
These devices, which are usually installed on the upstream side of the mass airflow MAF sensor, use stationary vanes or, on some devices, spinning blades to make the inlet air between the air cleaner and intake manifold whirl around in a mini-tornado. This vortex supposedly mixes fuel more thoroughly with air, which means the fuel will, theoretically, burn more completely in the combustion chamber.
Trouble is, there's a lot of intake tract downstream from these devices designed to maximize a smooth airflow. Turbulence, coupled with the restricted airflow caused by the device, can only reduce the amount of air sucked into the manifold.
Less air means less power. Again, we tested two devices. The TornadoFuelSaver is a nicely made stainless steel contraption, available in an assortment of sizes to fit most vehicles.
We installed it on our truck's intake tract immediately upstream of the MAF sensor. We purchased the second device, the Intake Twister, on eBay. It was crudely handmade from sheet-aluminum flashing and pop rivets. It looked like something we could make in about 10 minutes from an old soda can. The staff at UTI was reluctant to install it: The bent sheetmetal vanes looked as if they might break off and be digested by the engine. The device is one-size-fits-all, and is simply bent into a curl to insert it into the intake duct.
The Intake Twister increased fuel consumption by about 20 percent; the TornadoFuelSaver provided no significant change. The Electronic Engine Ionizer Fuel Saver consists of a couple of pieces of wire molded to some rubber blocks, which the manufacturer refers to as "capacitor blocks. The rubber blocks clip onto the spark plug wires near the plugs, and are intended to carry the "corona charge" from one cylinder's plug wire to the electrodes of the other plugs.
This charge is supposed to "cause a partial breakdown in the larger hydrocarbon molecules in all the non-firing cylinders, resulting in increased combustion efficiency. Normally, we try to prevent cross-coupling between spark plug wires to prevent crossfiring between cylinders. The Engine Ionizer seems calculated to promote crossfire. About 10 miles into our economy test, the left bank of rubber capacitor blocks started to melt and sag onto the red-hot exhaust manifold.
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