Need your car to run faster? Maybe want it to be more fuel-efficient? How about a cleaner engine? If you are looking for these types of upgrades, then fuel additives might sound like the perfect solution. Let’s talk about the fact and fiction of these magic car engine elixirs and, hopefully, by the end of the article you can see for yourself if they are worth the extra monthly expense.

What Are Fuel Additives?

Fuel additives: you’ve probably seen them on the shelves of every store that sells car stuff. They come in different shapes and colors but they always have something in common. They promise something big.

It can be as simple to understand as “cleans your engine as you go” to something as grand as “make your car run like it was 10 years younger”.

While there are other tests or studies that show whether or not they are telling the truth or not, the fact still remains that a lot of people are using these additives for their promised effects. Depending on the additive you are looking at, they contain a variety of chemicals that “promise” to give your car the different benefits you see in their product cover.

Are They Really Effective?

This is the question you have been waiting to get answered, right? It’s hard to give a solid answer but the best one we can give is that while they do seem to be so confident with their promises – there’s really no evidence showing that they are all effective. We can attribute it all to their marketing. If you ask me, it’s all about the hype with zero evidence to back them up.

The good thing is that they rarely do anything bad to your engine so if you really want to try them out it shouldn’t cause you problems afterwards.

While there are people who stand by their claim that they are really effective it all boils down to the gravity of the problem in the first place. This means if your car is a bit older and already experiencing problems with, let’s say fuel efficiency, then you might get better results than newer cars.

However, it can be unfair to lump them all together. Not all fuel additives are full of hot air. Some of them actually work. For example, there are diesel additives that are designed to prevent diesel from gel in colder climates.

The performance boosting additives are the ones that really have a bad reputation for being misleading. There have been plenty of tests on different octane boosters and none of them have shown consistent and promising results.

As for the additives that promise to clean your engine, they are quite redundant in nature. A lot of fuels nowadays contain cleaning agents so you might not need to add more – unless you have a really old car and you need the extra oomph in the cleaning department.

Maintenance is Key

While the promises being made by fuel additives can be very tempting, they are not the best answers to your car issues. Fortunately, with regular maintenance (and a repair here and there), you can keep your car back in tip-top shape year-round. For older cars, this can become quite a challenge, but nothing is impossible if you have a team of expert mechanics that can turn back time to get your car into like-new condition.

The team at T3 Atlanta are the mechanics you need to help you out. You can schedule regular maintenance to keep your car running at its best for as long as you own it. Give us a call today and we will pen you into the schedule right away.