When gas costs go up, all of a sudden all sorts of “gas saving” devices start to come out of the woodwork. They promise all sorts of incredible fuel savings using “snake oil salesmen” tactics to achieve the unrealistic savings they promise you will get.

Here are just a few of the items I was reading about while studying for today’s GotEngines.com post. The items tested included:

1. a couple of fuel-line magnets,

2. a pair of vortex generators,

3. an $80 piece of wire that’s supposed to ionize the fuel mixture,

4. a gasoline vapor injector and a water injector. The tests were conducted on the Universal Technical Institute’s chassis dynamometer, they apparently ran a set of pickup trucks through their paces, and as expected, none of these gadgets worked. Specifically, none of them increased fuel mileage, and most of them reduced the horsepower.

You know the story..if there was any way to increase fuel economy for the twenty or thirty dollars that some of these devices cost, it would  be on every car made today. The facts on fuel injection are very clear, as much as 99 percent of the fuel injected into your engine is burned. Even if you increased the combustion efficiency to 100 percent, the potential for improved mileage is only about 1 percent. No fuel saver can increase mileage by the 20% to 50% percent or more its manufacturers might claim.

One of the gadgets with another hard to believe claim was taken off the market between the original story and when the testing started. It’s a plastic button the size of a quarter with some self-stick tape on one side, and goes for $150 or so. You’re stick this to the bottom of the fuel tank of your vehicle, where it will make the molecules of fuel vibrate at a special frequency, and ionize or gain energy or some other wacky thing.

Realistically speaking, the only way to get improvement in your fuel mileage is A. Have your vehicle maintained regularly and tuned up at the specified intervals. B. Modify your driving habits in terms of accelerating slower and driving less aggressively, Heck, your car may last longer.

Don’t be fooled by those rediculous claims. Read the GotEngines.com Blog for real world information on getting the best fuel economy out of your car to making simple repairs at home and leaving more cash in your pocket.