Super Unleaded - i cant see the point - who runs it?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jez
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Defcon5 said:
Bet you cant tell the difference between halfords oil and castrols though? I certainly cant, yet I use it any way, because I beleive it is a superior quality product, and this view I also take with petrol
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Nope i've misplaced my two engines i've been running lubrication and wear bench tests on for the past 100k, dam!

The only person who could tell you which is better is someone who test engine wear rates with various oils, luckly we have just a man who does this (iirc) Simon?

I would find it hard to believe that Halfords oils could reach the same quality and standards as Edge, and this is shown because no Halfords products are branded to the latest VW oil standards.
 
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I think somewhat like a revised map on a NA car the value of 98/99 RON over lower grades is more to do with response and 'feel' than actually vastly increasing the performance, which it simply won't. Most people won't be able to feel much of a difference but the higher you go up the performance envelope the more chance you stand of feeling the difference. My RS4 certainly feels sharper with 98/99 RON, though at first I wasn't sure. If I now stick in a tank or two of 95 RON it begins to feel subjectively less sharp to respond to the throttle and the pull, again to me, feels less sharp. When my wife uses it and I get back into it I can tell if she put 95 RON in (she is Scottish!) and have commented a couple of times about it as it felt less sharp.

Is it worth the extra money day to day then probably no but there is a small difference in how the car feels (as opposed to actually performs) that does make it nicer to drive.
 
Defcon5 said:
Bet you cant tell the difference between halfords oil and castrols though? I certainly cant, yet I use it any way, because I beleive it is a superior quality product, and this view I also take with petrol
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Castrol tastes better.

I'm not sure what point you're making to be honest. You can't tell the difference, but use it because you believe it to be better, yet think Halfords oil will do the same as Catrol's best oil.

I think there's probably several oil experts who would wager otherwise. The effects might not be immediate, but I can imagine there would be differences.
 
PMKeates said:
Really? :p
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Yes - very much so.
As somebody else said - do you think all of the spotty youths in Halfords sit around with chemistry sets making the oil they sell?

Comma are the make behind Halfords oils - they are also behind Mobil.
The VW Specification Halfords oil is a great deal cheaper than a lot of the other makes out there and just does the job.
 
Halford's Oil as good as premium ones which meet stringent standards?

Don't think so some how.

Just because you cant tangibly notice a difference does not mean one is as good as another.

There is a website/person somewhere who breaks down oils and checks for all different contaminants etc. £100 says Halford's 'own' comes out considerably worse than premium products.
 
Tom|Nbk said:
First person brave enough to use Asda Smart Price oil gets a cookie.
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My mate has previously use Tesco value oil before. :) It comes out of the bottle scarily dark in colour. He used it when his engine was getting through oil at nearly the same rate as fuel. :p
 
Just to add something else to this debate, my dad's Picasso had an injector failure a week or so ago which cost ~£80 to replace. Apparently, the guy at the garage said supermarket fuel could have contributed to it failing and said to be wary in the future.

Whether that's true or whether its simply a case that it's a heap of junk French car carved out of cheese on which nearly everything else seems to have broken anyway is debatable.
 
I notice in some of my older engines but that's primarily because some of them are from the full-fat 5-star 100 octane era. Nothing a quick tweak doesn't usually eliminate, anyway....
 
I use V Power all the time, its a turbo car and is mapped to run on super unleaded. I put a tank of 95 ron in it as the garage I stopped in didn't have any super left. I happened to have my laptop in the back and logged the datablocks with vagcom. The car started knocking almost instantly under full boost and it retarded the timing quickly. It didn't feel that different not quite as smooth and higher up the revs it didn't seem to have as much pull this of course may have been in my head. Once I went back to super unleaded it took two full tanks of it before the ECU had advanced the timing to the level it was at before the tank of 95 RON. The 95RON tank was also a couple of MPG down on a super unleaded tank however you would need to average it out over more to get a more accurate picture on MPG.

My girlfriend runs non-vpower Shell diesel in her Zafira makes zero difference to the performance however it causes the DPF to regenerate significantly less that it does with super market diesel 300miles vs 800miles ish so it must be cleaner burning through the engine considering its the same price around here and it uses half a gallon of diesel to clean the DPF it works out a lot cheaper. Never tried vpower diesel in it but might see what it does at some point as I have seen mentioned it causes less smoke on non-dpf cars so it may extend the cleaning cycle further with a DPF.
 
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I have a 32 litre fuel tank (1.0 ltr engine! :D ), so an extra 5p per litre (at my local Tesco's) isnt that much to me.

I used to go for the cheap fuel, however, after once filling up the tank with Super Unleaded and noticing the massive speed increase, I've decided to buy it a bit more often.

I never thought that there would be that much of difference, but I was truely wrong :D

Dangerous Dave said:
blah blah blah.... vagcom... blah blah blah...
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Oh come on, you just made that word up! :P
 
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I always use super for the RX8 even though it is a car that really doesn't care about the RON...... but I have a good reason.

I don't pay for my petrol. More expensive petrol means more nectar points for me. More nectar points for me means more goodies :)
 
Ucof said:
I have a 32 litre fuel tank (1.0 ltr engine! :D ), so an extra 5p per litre (at my local Tesco's) isnt that much to me.

I used to go for the cheap fuel, however, after once filling up the tank with Super Unleaded and noticing the massive speed increase, I've decided to buy it a bit more often.

I never thought that there would be that much of difference, but I was truely wrong :D



Oh come on, you just made that word up! :P
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Please tell me that 1.0ltr engine is on a bike?
 
For sheer comedy value I do hope it's a normally aspirated city car.

I can sense the LOL building up in my blood stream :p
 
merlin said:
For sheer comedy value I do hope it's a normally aspirated city car.

I can sense the LOL building up in my blood stream :p
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He has (potentially) single handedly ruined the whole argument for the use of super unleaded fuels :D
 
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