Speaking of gasoline, the US government is thinking of making only one grade of gasoline......Octane rating of 95. The Europeans have been doing that for years and get better mileage as the engines in their cars are of higher compression. See that story here....... Auto industry lobbies for 95 octane as new regular The higher compression ability of 95 octane may help the Atkinson engines used in the Prius and other autos as higher compression means more power for the same amount of fuel. We need to call our congress and senate to push for one grade of gasoline....which will mean cheaper fuel prices as the refiners do not have to make three grades of fuel...only one. And it will mean better mileage and end the nonsense of winter and summer gasoline in the colder areas of the country.
High octane gas is expensive gas. Winter and summer gas has to do with fuel vaporization, not octane.
Don't know where I come down in this one. People and businesses in particular will almost always advocate for what is best for THEM.....regardless of what impact it has on others. So any time a big business advocates for more regulations you should be VERY skeptical. Higher compression engines generally require more expensive parts to withstand the higher pressures and if you skimp on parts, they wear faster. It might be better to outlaw any vehicle that will go over 90 MPH and require all of them to use regular. Or it might be better to just leave things ALONE and let the market work it out. Almost EVERY TIME the government gets involved in something that they don't NEED to be, it ends up worse instead of better.
Interesting. Well first thing is 95 Octane does not tell us much. We need to know if that is Motor Octane, Research Octane, or AKI (average). Most other countries use Research Octane, so USA Regular 87 AKI is about 91 Research Octane. Most other countries do not have one octane grade either, as far as I know. Prius is an example of a 55-MPG auto that works perfectly well on 87 or less Octane, so its hard to grasp why 95 is needed as the only grade. >>There is some argument for reconsidering gasoline formulation in the USA, because the current EPA recipe is 30-years old. Everything we do now goes back to the 1990 Clean Air Act Ammendments which included extensive Auto/Oil joint industry testing of fuel blends looking for the cleanest burning formulations. The higher octane gasoline components tend to make more emissions, so EPA wanted to minimize octane to allow a gasoline with lower emissions (and lower MPG because it is the juicy energy stuff that EPA wanted to minimize). But the auto/oil tests are going on 30-years old, and cars are so much cleaner now due to super-good 3-way catalytic converters, and the cat converters are now super-charged by the newer rules mandating the oil industry take all the sulfur out of the gasoline. So in theory we could relax EPA's RFG formulation and still a Prius would make almost zero emissions.
Exactly...what Congress *should* do is set the standard for emissions levels they want, and let the formula float as long as emissions levels are met. What Congress *will* do is mandate formula based on politics such as max out on ethanol, even if that is more emissions, that is the formula Congress wants to mandate.
"... 95 RON octane gasoline -- basically the same grade as Europe’s regular and the lowest grade of premium here. .. are seeking just one grade of fuel: 95. That would eliminate today's grades, generally 87 octane for regular, 88-90 for midgrade and 91-94 for premium. ..." Based on the way this story's author intermixes figures from different octane rating scales, without meaningful disclosure to the common reader, I must say that even he has no clue about it.
I'd like the one grade - one of the reasons I didn't buy a Gen 3 is because (here), min RON is 95, Gen 4 specifies 91 RON, and uses less of it. Good chance is that my next car will demand 95 - more and more cars, GOLF, FOCUS, anything from EU or UK, all LEXUS and anything Japanese which isn't a base grade is demanding 95 these days here, at substantially more (16 cents per litre). I've tried both 95 and 98 in my Gen 4 - and couldn't detect any measurable improvement in economy.
High octane would be less expensive if it was the ONLY gas made. Of course, if the government gets involved in it, then who knows how much it would cost! The three standard grades makes gasoline chemistry more expensive in the long run. One grade all the time would be cheaper theoretically. Won't have to worry about fuel vaporization with a higher compression engine that higher octane can allow to be used. The idea of vaporization is kind of funny...never had to worry about that back in the 60's or even up to the 90's. Only when so called scientists got paid lots of money to say that vaporization was a problem did we end up with the crummiest gas and terrible MPG numbers.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it would be as cheap as the current lower octane that most vehicles find quite satisfactory. Nor that the nation's overall gas bill would be any lower. Only the folks now getting the most expensive octane would be assured of any benefit from the higher volume. ???? I must question whether or not you have any clue about what this seasonal vapor pressure issue is about. It has everything to do with cold starts in winter, and hot summer vapor lock, and air pollution from hot weather evaporative emissions from the fuel tank, and nothing to do with engine compression. BS. My little sister, a chemical engineer at an oil refinery (now retired), was explaining this issue to me back in the mid-1980s, including older coworker war stories of refinery screwups that happened before her time. One was shipping the wrong vapor pressure product to a hot weather destination, creating a long string of stalled vapor-locked cars down the highway from the filling station. Automobile MPGs have climbed a lot since then, not gone down.
The Prius does not have a high compression engine. While its expansion ratio is quite high, its compression ratio is very ordinary and mundane.
Agreed. The Prius of today is Atkinson cycle and has no need for premium fuel. If 95 octane is the standard of the future, you can bet that the Prius engineers will take that into account and design engines to take advantage of the ability of 95 octane to handle the higher compression. My guess is that with the recent advancements of solid state batteries, gasoline will become less of an issue. With charge times of less than 5 minutes and a range of over 500 miles, solid state batteries seem to be the future. Time will tell.
I know this......back in the 50's, 60's and 70's, this was not an issue. It was government mandates that cause this technical problem......I do have a clue......I thought I was wrong once....but I was wrong about that!
We may have lived through different 50s to 70s. It was very much an issue for my area of the country.
(Earlier, you said 'up to the 90s', not just 70s.) No cold winter starting problems? No hot weather vapor lock problems? Huh?? These are not government mandate issues, they are customer complaint issues. No smog or air pollution from unburned hydrocarbons? Sorry, but before government mandates for air quality, we had plenty of very dirty and unhealthy air here. Private industry and private individuals did not clean it up voluntarily, it took government mandates. And this century I've visited China multiple times, experiencing plenty of very bad air due to toothless government enforcement. I didn't have first hand experience of the 1950s. But as Jimbo noted, we must have lived through different 1960s and 1970s. This past August and September, I had significant respiratory problems exacerbated by wildfire smoke. The industrial air pollution I experienced in my youth, before the government mandates began cleaning it up, was worse than this year's smoke.
