MetroMPG.com visitors have sent me this question more than a few times.
The most recent:
Quote:
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Have you tried adding 2 or 3 ounces of acetone to 10 (US) gallons of fuel? I have read it increases mileage, but have never tried it.
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The short answer is: no, I haven't tried it, and I don't have any plans to.
The long answer is:
- Testing fuel additives outside of a laboratory is extremely difficult to do, because of the lack of control over external variables that can affect the results.
- I will only attempt to test things that can be easily & quickly added/removed from the car so that data can be collected immediately before and after the change, under identical environmental conditions, in an A-B-A manner (and I should add: absent all other traffic, on cruise control, averaging bi-directional runs on a level, straight road). Fuel/oil additives obviously present a problem to that approach. And even this approach is far from the ideal.
- Some people have tried evaluating fuel additives (& other modifications) based on frequently repeated, identical trips in "normal" driving - e.g. their daily commute - despite varying weather & traffic conditions. I don't have a regular commute, so that's not an option for me.
Besides, I'm personally not comfortable drawing conclusions from those conditions, because there's no control over changing weather & traffic variables, not to mention not being able to exclude the experimenter's own behaviour (driving) from the test.
Some people have persisted: Why don't I just
try adding some and see if it makes a difference?
- Because not being able to do an A-B-A test under conditions that are as controlled as possible, I'd have little confidence that any difference I might see could be attributed to the acetone (or insert name of any other fuel/oil additive) vs. some other uncontrolled effect.
- On top of that, I haven't seen any sound scientific explanation for why acetone should work.
I tend to agree this skeptical view of acetone:
http://www.fuelsaving.info/acetone.htm
It's worth a read if you haven't seen it already.