OMG your shit is gonna blow up.......hahaha

 

Well... I'm anal when it comes to my car

You guys sure I shouldnt add an octane booster?

 

No.

 

well this is too general a statement to make.

if you consider slightly poorer gas mileage, lost power, and even a slight risk of damage "ok", then yeah i guess you'd be "ok" if you filled the entire tank with regular.

 

True that, I would never recommend filling it up with regular gas, but one time probably wouldn't kill ya. I remember a user a while ago that started a thread stating that the rest of us were wasting our money by buying premium gas and that he only ever used regular gas.

 

For all you fuel buffs out there answer this question. On a recent long trip I took I new I would use 2 tanks of gas on the way there so I decided to see which got the better mileage, reg or premium. I started out with regular, keep in mind 90% of the driving was done with the cruise set at 74 mph or 4k on the tach, on the first tank I averaged right at 30 mpg. On the second tank of premium I average right at 29 mpg. While the difference is negligable I still wonder why the higer mileage on the regular fuel. Any hoo I still prefer to use premium, but I have used regular before with out any negative result except the slightest bit of performance downgrade. My mechanic that services my car said that while regular won't hurt it it will cause the engine to automatically retard the timing.

 

^^ your mechanic is somewhat misleading you.

our cars have knock sensors. their job is to detect knock, and pull timing if they detect knock. however, your car will want to continue to try to come back to it's regular timing map so will continue to "test" or slowly advance timing until it can be brought back close to the regular timing.

the caveat is, it won't actually retard the timing in the first place UNTIL IT ACTUALLY DETECTS DETONATION. detonation is bad. and likewise, as your car continues to try to return timing to normal, there is a risk you will have more detonation before the car pulls the timing again.

to say using regular won't hurt it is an uneducated fallacy at best. these cars have very high compression, and regular gas just won't cut it. fortunatley honda put in paranoid knock sensors, so even a stock S2000 will pull slight timing on even 94 octane (hence the reason race gas can offer a few hp gain)

So. You WILL lose power on regular gas. (even if you don't "feel" like you're losing power, you are) You will suffer some detonation on regular gas. And you will also likely lose a bit of gas mileage.

And you DO run a small risk of actually damaging something. Detonation is bad for any engine. And in worst case scenario, you could damage something.

So, I guess my point is, if you bought a $32,000 sports car, and yet want to save a measly $2.00 on every fill-up, why are you even driving this car. If someone intentionally puts regular in their S2000, IMO they should sell the car because they obviously don't know how to take care of it. (and the $2.00 you save per tank could be even less if anything at all depending on how much your gas mileage suffers)

 

this is hardly conclusive or scientific in any way. you drove 2 completely different stretches of road, so ther could be variations in hill grade or road surface, even how often you were or weren't around other cars, temperature differences, etc, and the list goes on.

 

Warren

 

Just fill the tank w/ premium. The fuel will mix. I did something similar with another car I had several years ago.

I had to use premium instead of regular so that I wouln't have a bunch of pinging. I accidently put some regular in, maybe 2 or 3 gallons. I realized what I did and stopped, then put in premium.

The two fuels mixed fine and it didn't even knock a bit. So .78Gal is nothing to worry about, just fill it the rest of the way w/ premium.

Warren