favorite gasoline brands?

Toyota and some other manufacturers have banded together to recommend "Top Tier" gas for their vehicles. I don't know if I buy into it, but I get a 5% rebate with my Shell Visa, so I use Shell; if there's a big difference in price between Shell and Costco, I'll sometimes use Costco.

Top Tier Gasoline

 

I've been using gas that is supposedly not from the middle east. These are to include: Hess, Citgo, Costco which I believe is BP and a few others.

 

1. Shell regular seems to work well.
2. Petro-Canada regular offered about 5% poorer mileage than Shell regular (this was a bit surprising -- I expected it to be as good as or better than Shell).
3. Running Shell Premium right now -- so far the mileage seems the same or maybe a bit better than Shell regular, but the tank is still nearly full so it's too early to tell.

 

I believe there is a difference between "top tier" fuel and fuel that isn't. Level of detergent is only one, but important difference.

 

I agree with a64pilot. My understanding is when a tanker unloads, it's just gasoline. Then refiners buy the gas and mix additives to the specs requested by the retailer. The differences is just the additives. --TK

 

I use Valero. Our 76 in town got bought by the guy who owned the Valero - now we just have two Valeros, literally one block from each other.

Anyone know about their quality?

 

+1

I generally use Chevron (one of the top tier brands), which contains techron. You can also buy bottles of techron at the auto parts store.

 

My last two tanks were cut rate gas stations. Fred Meyer and another off the wall station in Longview Washington, both contained 10% ethanol.

Mileage was over 55 MPG both times, calculated, not MFD.

The only difference you will find is a gas station that does not use Ethanol. Than you will get more Miles Per Gallon.

alfon

 

I use BP for that reason. However, I totally avoid CITGO as well. While the gas stations may be privately owned, the oil from Venezuela, CITGO is a state owned company controlled by a man that would love nothing more than to see the US completely destroyed. I don't place Chavez any higher on my list of US friends than I do Iran.

 

Some of your stations (where they sell food and groceries_won't mention names) use an off spec gasoline. Doesn't mean it's bad, just that it didn't meet the specifications of those companies that requested a certain blend with specific additives.

 

99.9999% of the people here and in car magazines will tell you that you're wasting your money with Premium unless your cars engine was designed to run on premium. I'd agree with them. There are other threads for this discussion though.

 

It get the cheapest. It all pretty much comes from the same tap up here.

 

Does Alaska have refineries or does the oil get shipped out and then gasoline shipped back?

 

I used to get the cheapest (grocery store, sams club, etc) until I realzied it was causing issues with my old car (96 chevy lumina). Switched to Shell and BP, issues went away. Will never go the cheap route again, especially with 2010 prius.

 

With a car as efficient as the Prius, there doesn't seem much point to going cheap. We're usually only talking about $1 savings every 600 miles...

 

Costco

 

You're right about this. I've worked in a Valero (Ultramar in Canada) refinery and at the tanker truck loading ramp there was a first stop to load the gasoline and a second stop for additives for each ''branded'' gasoline. I don't remember all brands but there was Shell, Petro-Canada, Esso and evidently Ultramar.

 

I've burned many brands over the hears and found that in my Honda's and Toyota's, none of them had a problem with any brand. I currently burn Speedway in both cars and have not had any problems. This is the station close to home although when traveling, I burn what is conveniently located.