[Lyle O]

It is pretty funny reading all of this, as I was with Bosch back in the '80s when we introduced fuel injection broadly to the US OEMs. All of them began having problems with clogging injectors, which, of course they blamed on us. However, we had no such problems in Europe. We quickly determined that it was all driven by the quality of the gas (type and quantity of additives) that would result in performance issues. In the US, major brands like Shell and Mobile were no issue, but there were so many smaller and generic providers that did not formulate at all appropriately. This was not the case in Europe, where formulations were much better (and they were still using largely leaded gas). As they transitioned to unleaded later than we did, the additive packages were more thoroughly formulated. Since the injectors were developed in Europe, they were, in fact, designed to run high quality fuels with appropriate detergent additives. Bosch had to make design changes to the injectors to accommodate this discrepancy.

Interestingly, if you fast-forward to today, there is another emerging issue regarding fuel quality: oligomer leaching from plastic fuel lines. plastic fuel lines have an inner layer of PA12 typically (high grade nylon). The problem is that in some regions (especially China) there are additives which are causing a break down in the polymer chain, and the resultant leached-out material clogs up the fuel system. Today, my company is a major supplier of fuel lines to OEMs around the world, and we are developing tube constructions with different materiials to address this. Bottom line, I learned a long time ago that quality of fuels matter, and this never changes.
Lyle.