Since I purchased my Lexus RX330 in 2004, I have used premium gas. With the price of gas going through the ceiling, I’d like to use regular gas. Can I?
What does your owners manual or gas cap sticker say to use? Premium?
Using a lesser octane rated fuel will lead to engine pinging, roughness and to the engine losing normal power.
You could try a mid range fuel but that’s up to you as I won’t recommend it.
Haven’t you noticed? It’s not just the price of premium that has gone up, the price of regular has also skyrocketed. If you were able to tolerate the extra dime for premium before this mess, live with it now. The same conditions apply. Continue using premium; your Lexus wants it.
Car makers design finely tuned, high efficiency, high performing engines just to make you use premium gasoline, don’t they? Wouldn’t you rather have a low efficiency, low performing, unrefined engine that would burn anything?
Have you not noticed the price difference with regular vs premium is actually lower than when you bought it. It still remains about $0.20/gallon even though fuel increased in cost from $2.00/gallon to $4.00/gallon. So now its a 5-6% premium over regular where back in 2004 it was about 10%. Its getting cheaper.
That being all said. If you see the word “REQUIRED” in the fuel door or manual use. If you see “RECOMMENDED” you can revert to regular and see a slight loss of performance and likely a bit of MPG.
I just received a product update and warranty extension letter from Mazda regarding my RX-8. It consists of s slick video about the rotary, an extension of the engine warranty to 100,000 miles, and Mazda actually tells owners that they should use no lower than 91 octane (93 is premium in my area, 91 is midrange, 87 is regular). Rocketman