My Car News

People ask me for the easiest solution to make improvements to a car. They see things like Vortex Tornado or whatever that thing is goes in the intake, and it supposedly mixes the air better and improves mileage and horsepower. By the way, that is BS. The engineers at your favorite car company spend a lot of time making your intake as efficient and quiet as possible. So adding a piece of tin is not likely to help. Go ahead and try it, though, but I will be skeptical of the results. Maybe you subconsciously drive more prudently and inadvertently improve your mileage when you use one. Horsepower? Professional race teams spend a lot of time and money improving horsepower. Don't you think they would use a piece of tin if it would help? My favorite miracle product is called Marvel Mystery Oil. It is a simple additive that cleans the engine. It takes time, and it isn't really a miracle, but it works. A lot of Hondas from the 80s had a problem with oil consumption. I overhauled an engine once because of it. It turns out that overhauling the engine is not necessary. The problem was those Honda engineers made the engine too good. The tolerances were too tight for the oil rings. When they get dirty, they stick and the engine burns oil. All I really had to do was clean the engine. Marvel Mystery Oil does that. When I was at BSU, a professor asked me what to do about a Prelude that was smoking. I told her to change the oil and replace one quart with MMO, and do that every 1000 miles until it stops smoking. She agreed that changing the oil that many times would still be cheaper than major repairs. It worked. After about a year and about five oil changes, the smoking stopped. I had an 85 Mazda RX7 with the original engine for a couple years. It had about 130,000 miles on it, which is getting close to the end of its life. It ran ok, but I started putting MMO in the fuel, and it ran better. Turns out that MMO is well known in the RX7 community as the trick to better performance. Now I put it in all of my cars just on principle. It keeps them clean and they run better longer. I recently got an '89 Mazda B2600i with 225,000 miles on it. I put MMO in the gas, and it caused some deposits on the plugs, but otherwise it cleaned up and runs great. I am not saying that other products don't work. I have never tried anything else other than gas dryers. I am one of those guys who finds something that works, and I quit looking.