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Ah, the QUALITY of combustion argument. Well, since these systems employ no strategy to keep the H and HO from recombining after separation, I see little reason to believe that anything other than water injection is occuring. My dad used a water mist on his '84 S15 truck to improve quality of combustion. Water injection is known to help with knocking. However, he consumed a liter of water every 50 commuting miles or so.
The next canned arguement - but ICEs are really inefficient. Anything that improves quality of combustion will have big gains. After all, is there really a problem with the combustion 'quality' of our motors? I'm pretty sure they do a good job of burning the gas. The fact that the ICE is inefficient isn't because combustion is lacking. Rather, the ICE has difficulty extracting the realeased energy. Any second year mechanical engineer can tell you that the realized efficiency is a factor of two things. Compression ratio and pre-combustion charge temperature. Higher compression is better. Lower starting temperature is better. Unfortunately, in-chamber compression leads to higher temperatures pre-combustion. That's why turbo chargers have the potential for great process efficiency gains. Compress, then intercool, then combust.
The dreamers are those that have original thoughts that may or may not work. At this point, I see little original about this. It's a bunch of water filled coke bottles in the trunk that are supposed to help fuel mileage. Because the driver wants to see better mileage, he drives really easy to 'test' the effect. He gets better mileage (as a result of driving more easily) and there you have it.
Please excuse the rant.
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