I had the old attitude that premium fuel is not worth the $$ - well I can say now that I was wrong. After reading numerous posts here about the beneifts of premium, I decided to fork over the the extra money and test it for my self. I began keeping a a fuel log for about a month running regular unleaded and calculating MPG - for that time, I averaged 14.42 MPG. Then I switched to premium and low and behold the tales were true - I now get 16.57 MPG on average and that's just the first tank.

I also caculated the cost per mile - with reg it was $0.12 and with premium it was $0.10. And now with the price of gs comming back down a little bit, that shoudl get better.

Now I have installed the SuperChips Towing Perf and a K&N drop in air filter and hope that the MPG continues to rise a little more. Especially since I'm goingon a 600+ mi trip towing my camper - in the past I got about 8 MPG while towing - it would be great if the difference remains the same and i get 10 or more MPG while towing, that would really make the savings grow.

BTW, since I installed the SuperChips I got increased MPG eventhough I drove a littel harder to test the performance.

Just my testimony. Any doubts? Try it yourself.

 

I've been saying this all along. premium with the chip/tuner is cheaper to run, the higher the gas price the better the savings.
Randy

 

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your post!

Generally speaking, when you use premium gas in an engine that is tuned for 87 octane, the mpg usually (but not always) does not come up much, if any, unless the fuel has a significantly higher energy (BTU) content. This is because the higher octane mixture takes longer to ignite, so the normal result is actually to make *less* power and get worse mpg - again, in this instance I'm talking about using premium gas on the STOCK factory 87 octane tune.

Now when using good performance tuning, it usually only takes about a 1.5 mpg gain in these F-150's to completely offset the additional 20 cent per gallon average cost of premium over regular fuels - making it to your advantage to use premium gas and good performance tuning in many cases, just as your post pointed out. I think the most telling spec is the actual fuel cost-per-mile, that tells the tale pretty quick - thanks for posting that data.

The potential for better mpg with our performance tuning comes primarily from the additional spark advance used on part-throttle as part of our tuning for premium gasoline - this lowers the load on the motor a bit all else being equal, making it run more efficiently thus it uses a little bit less fuel to get the same amount of "work" done - when that happens, you get a little bit better mpg. In your case, a bit more than 2.0 mpg gain, so far.

Thanks for your post, glad to see you're happy with your results!