Chevron vs. generic gas

My car loves chevron❤ . It gives me more on mileage. I have try wawa, racetrack and BP (the worst.)… Those goes away like water.

If you are going to reopen an 8 year old thread, please at least make some kind of sense !!!

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Do you use premium gas, too?

Long as we are kicking around an old thread, let me fill in some historical detail - old men like to do that…

Back in the mid-1970s, we started putting catalytic converters on cars. Manufacturers switched from carburetors to fuel injection so they could more precisely control the air/fuel mixture. The Europeans had been using fuel injection for over a decade, but the new generation of fuel injectors had smaller orifices than the older versions.

A decade later, in the mid-1980s, these 10-year-old cars had a lot of problems with deposits in their fuel injectors, so the oil companies raced to come up with better detergents with surfactants to prevent deposits from accumulating in injector orifices. Each vendor claimed to have the best additive package.

In the late 1980s, my company had a government contract to compare different brands of fuel to see which ones worked the best at keeping injectors clean. Chevron’s Techron additive was the winner in that competition, and Chevron rode that wave for at least 20 years. I did some contract work for Chevron Research and Technology in the early 1990s and the team that developed Techron were treated like rock stars within Chevron. Hence Chevron’s reputation for being the ‘best’ fuel.

As for gas mileage, that can be related to the fuel’s energy density, and to a lesser extent, to the match of the octane to the particular engine’s compression, combustion chamber temperature, valve timing, and ignition timing control algorithm. As noted in this thread, all brands of fuel in a region are typically identical base fuel with different additive packages for each brand of fuel. However, there used to be a lot of small independent refineries in this country. It is conceivable that in a specific market, generic fuel was coming from a local independent refinery, and may have had a slightly different composition.

Independent refineries have been squeezed out by onerous, costly, (and often ill-advised) government regulations.

SOME manufacturers switched to fuel injection in the 70’s. VW was one. But most didn’t embrace fuel injection until the mid to late 80’s. And companies like GM when half way with their Throttle Body fuel injection.

Chevron has become a very regional company. They were plentiful where I grew up in NY. But now I’ve only seen them when I travel to the south.