rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about the worst gas stations in the
United States and how you can avoid them, cars burn gasoline you're always going
to the gas station to fill them back up, you want to have a good experience, you
don't want to get crappy gas, you want your car to run right so what
should you do, well I know a little bit about gas stations that's where I started
my father ran a corner Texaco station and I started working there when I was
14, to begin with realized that most gas stations they have a very similar
gasoline that they're selling, the raw gasoline is created at a petroleum
refinery factory ,then they go to like these three million gallon places, each
individual manufacturer then takes out what they want and puts in their own
additive package, so it realize the base gasoline in most stations is exactly the
same as all the other ones around you the only difference is the additive
package that they stick in, and unfortunately for the consumer none of
them ever tell you exactly what these additive packages are, my father
hey he ran a gas station but he was more of an intellectual he liked playing
contract bridge, but I asked him once I said, hey you know what's in this
gasoline you're selling, he says hey I have no idea what's in it I'm just in
the middle of man, he wasn't even interested what was it in, I've tried to
find out exactly what these additives are nobody will tell you, now years ago
that decent fuel injection cleaner Chevron techron used to tell you how
much additives PEA, that's the main cleaner was in the can, years ago they
even stopped telling you that, and I asked a guy once how come you guys don't
show that anymore what the percentage of cleaner is, an executive at Chevron just
said, Oh Scotty you know we don't want to get in an additive war where all the
companies say well we contain 3%, I know we contain 4% so they don't even tell
you how much is in it so you really have no idea, the only thing you can really be
sure of is that almost all the gasoline is the United States contains 10%
ethanol as an octane booster, now there are some out there that don't contain
any ethanol that costs a lot more and some guys with old cars swear by it, but
for the average drivers out there you're gonna get 10% ethanol inside your gas, now
when I was young mechanic they added lead to the gasoline to raise
the octane, but of course that kills people over time your breathing that
stuff in as it burns out, so then they came out with another additive but turns
out that causes cancer and a lot of it was leaching out of tanks they had a big
suit in California, so then they switched to ethanol to use ethanol as a booster
and to make all those farmers in the Midwest happy that now they could do
something with all that corn that they grow besides sticking it in storage silos
Plus then it didn't matter to the farmers how crappy the corn tasted because no
one was eating, it they were just turning into ethanol to blend with the gasoline
now the problem with ethanol is if you have too much it can make a normal
car start to run poor and corrode stuff, now there are inspections for this but
each state in the United States has individual rules for them, this is an
ethanol testing kit you can get one of these things for like six seven bucks on
Amazon you can actually test how much ethanol is in the gas that you buy, the
states are supposed to do that but some are real stringent some aren't, so if
you're curious the next time you fill your car up, you might take a little
sample do this test see how much ethanol is in it and if it's more than 10% and
you're being cheated, not only can too much ethanol damage your car you get
worst gas mileage, ethanol contains about 20 percent less energy than gasoline so
let's say you ran on a hundred percent ethanol there are some cars that are set
up that way, you would get 20% worst gas mileage and that same vehicle then if
you used 100 percent gasoline, how do you choose which gas station to go, now that
I tell you that really the base gasoline is pretty much the same in all of them, now
I mean they do have that thing that's listed
top-tier stations that's kind of a game that they're playing between the
manufacturers and the manufacturers of gasoline, they've always been fighting back and
forth where the car makers say you can make gasoline really well so our cars
will run great, and then the gasoline manufacturers say hey you can make cars
that can run on any kind of gasoline that we make, their always battling back and
forth so they came up with this top tier idea that, oh here's the ones that have
better additives and lalala but they never tell you how much additives are in and
what type are in at all, they say oh well that's our copyright we don't want to
tell anybody, so here again you get stonewalled on you know who has the in
quote best gas, take places that are off-brand generally they buy there's
what's called the spot market of gasoline so a place like Kroger, that day
whoever's got the best price that's who they're gonna buy it from, so from day to
day, month to month, week to week you might be getting different gas at the
same pump, it's all the same base gasoline in these three million gallon
setups, each person each company puts their own additive package in, so it's
not like you're gonna get garbage at least here in the United States, one of
your main reasons to pick a gas station to go to is honestly, CBS did a report
here in Texas and found out that there were certain stations that we're doing
what's called pump jumping, this is why are the station's keep a little bit of
money on the pump before you start pumping, so you're paying for gas that
you're not getting pumped into your tank, 1 Texaco station Austin got caught doing
this 17 times, and here Houston their have been
stations that have been shown to have people putting those credit card readers
in the machines out at the island, so when they quick put your card in and out,
they're reading your card and stealing your credit card information, if you
found that your corner station has been reported for having these credit card
thefts or pump jumping, or any other type of scam, stay away from that station, now
when I was a young mechanic we had full service, even if I was working on a car I
had to get out, wash the customers windshield check his oil while I'm
pumping the gas, most of that full service is long gone unless you live in
a state like New Jersey or something where they don't let people pump their
own they, say it's for safety reasons it's something I find amazing, because
the rest of the country nobody seems to have problems pumping their own gas
and not blowing things up, but I guess in Jersey hey maybe they burnt down
places by starting fires, who knows but in Jersey they say you're not allowed to
pump your own gas, knowing the history of New Jersey I would put that you can't
pump your own gas in New Jersey more down to the overall corruption of the
state, the gas stations probably got some kind of a lobby where they want
to continue the pump it so they could charge higher prices who knows, round here
they're all self-serve, so if you go in it's called a convenience station for a
reason, you put your car in or you got your phone and you just beep, then you
pump your gas and when you're done, it;s supposed to give you a receipt, well if
that receipt doesn't work and it says oh come inside to see cashier, that kind of
negated the idea of the convenience station in the first place, so if you go
to one of those stations and all the time the printer doesn't work and you got
to go inside, go somewhere else my father would be rolling over in his grave, you take
care of the customers not just sit there and not even have a machine that works
right, the next thing to check on a station you don't want to go to is, check
the prices all the time just out of curiosity, because when I was a young
mechanic they were mechanical machines and when the price of gas changed, we had
to take the Machine apart, we had to get on our Allen wrenches, and we had to
reset the price per gallon manually on each pump, but today of course it's all
done electronically, and there have been cases depending on the hour whether it's
raining or not, they would change the price that they were selling gasoline,
and check the prices maybe get your phone out take pictures during the day
at a station near you, and see if the price has changed just like that
uber stuff where they have, oh well now the rates are higher cuz it's raining
outside, check that out if you see there's a station that does that stay
away from them, and here's something that I have seen in the past you might be
paying for a gallon of gasoline but let's say you're only getting ninety
percent of a gallon when it's being pumped out, cuz it's not metering it
right where the cylinders were supposed to be filled of 10 gallons of gasoline,
but they were only like nine and a quarter, so people cheat on that, they
always did in the past I knew that, once when I was a kid I went to one of these
discount stations this was a long time ago gas was selling at 29 cents a gallon,
so I brought out a measuring thing and I put exactly one gallon in and it was
only about 85% full they were really cheating that's probably why it was the
cheapest place in tow,n it's 29 cents a gallon but they were cheating you on it, so
if you ever find a station that was flagged for cheating like that stay
away from that, and if you're curious yourself, hey
get yourself a gallon jug maybe for a lawnmower you use it
later, put exactly 1.000 gallons in it and see if it's full or not, and if it
isn't you can contact your own state there's very few times they're tested,
even in the States the test, lucky if they show up once a year to test the
stuff, guys that run the place they pretty much know that, so now you know a little
bit more about gas stations and which gas station you should avoid at all costs, so
if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that Bell