Just been sent a spam e-mail advertising this fantastic gadget. You clip it on to your fuel line and it reduces fuel consumption by 27%, emissions by 43% and increases torque! Probably makes tea and receives faxes too I shouldn\'t wonder.
www.bestchoicefuel.org/default.asp? axel=4090
Is this the total scam I think it is or has motoring science moved on in leaps and bounds?
A.
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If it seems too good to be true then it probably is!
I can't believe that simply clipping on this gizmo will give you 10% more horse power.
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A very superficial read thru the link you kindly posted raises 2 questions, at least. If it features on the cover of a June 2000 magazine and it is so marvellous how come it has taken 3 years to get advertised/promoted? It can't prevent diesel gelling, as the device is fixed to an engine fuel pipe but diesel gels in the tank!
Snake oil comes to mind, a Wild West cure-all which would fix bunions, pox, flu, coughs and colds, improve you s*x life etc. You don't that in Superdrug today though do you?
If this device was that marvellous then it would be fitted by the manufacturers of all cars, Greenpeace would insist that they were made compulsory, like catalytic converters and so on.
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What is it?
"It is a MATCHED PAIR of tuned custom sealed Neodymium Super inductors that generate a frequency resonance between its two faces."
Oh! that'll be a magnet then.
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What does it do?
Operates on the principle of RESONANCE, utilizing a double chamber frequency with phased frequency modulation
I hear you can get more acceleration if you route power from the phaser banks to the engine room. Beam me up Scotty.
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Rubbish. Funny that most of the large European manufacturers have spent millions on engine economy development - notably swirl chambers, FSI, etc etc to produce 10% improvements in fuel consumption.
Silly them, they could just have stuck a magnet on the fuel line all along...
Total scam. Any minor benefits will be placebo effect only. What you have to see here is that these guys are selling a 1 quid magnet in a 25p plastic moulding for the princely sum of 90 dollars. If you really wanted to prove to yourself the ridiculousness of this you can do the experiment yourself from a cheaply purchased magnet!
No doubt someone will respond and say they have one and it has made a difference. Sadly not - The company I work for actually tested these "for a laugh" on a proper live rolling road test bed. Difference = not a sausage, 0%, nil points...
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Of course, all the people who do buy this will be driving extra carefully to reap the fuel economy benefits, at least for a while.
No doubt all the claims are 'up to' which means that the 5% or so they'll get from driving more gently while waiting to see exactly what this does will be 'up to' the benefit promised. Assuming of course they eer find the spammers in the first place.
Then of course when they go for the power benefits, they'll floor it and doubly notice the difference there, too.
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There is a British company that supplies small rare-earth magnets to clip on diesel fuel lines (mainly on big trucks) - I believe they do good business. Just shows how gullible some folk can be.
As an aside - many years ago I was working for a major motor industry consultancy (call it 'XXXXX'). We were approached by a guy with an 'economy device' to test. It consisted of a small box with four thin wires coming out. Each wire was twisted around a plug lead. He wanted it fitted on a test engine and then a report to be written on whether economy had improved, or not.
Anyway, he was given a quote (which he accepted) and the box was given to us with the express instructions that it should not be opened.
It was fitted and tested. The report said that no improvement in power or economy had been measured - basically it did nothing.
We then later saw the device advertised in the press with "Tested at XXXXX" in the copy!!
The guy never came back for his test box and so someone opened it up. The wires just went into the box and were tied in a knot.....
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Truly amazing.
For $90-odd you can have something that the multi-trillion dollar car manufacturing corporations haven't thought of?
Truly amazing, but someone will fall for it.
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I'm a little surprised they are not committing an illegal act by advertising it, since the description of what it does is clearly nonsense, and the claims of it being tested have to be wrong.
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From my trawl of Indian web-sites (car related) these gizmos seemed particularly popular over there.
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I'm a little surprised they are not committing an illegal act by advertising it, since the description of what it does is clearly nonsense, and the claims of it being tested have to be wrong.
If they advertised it here they would fall foul of the Advertising Standards Authority. However, in the USA it seems ads do not have to be legal, honest, decent and truthful.
Incidentally, I have invented a compound for tyres that lasts 14 trillion times longer. Sounds good? Since the original basis of the test is a banana skin...........
Maybe I will make a fortune in America.
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One of my staff at work has fitted something similar to the water inlet of his Koi Carp pond and it has substantially reduced the amount of weed in the water. An engineer I know at a plant that suffers from hard water has put an electronic version on his water main and it was so succesful in reducing scale that it has persuaded me to fit one to the cooling water on two of my refrigeration plants. They work by altering the the scale forming compound in the water. In one case so the plants cant use it as food in the other so the scale cant stick to hot surfaces. Many people still dont think these work on water but they do. But petrol? I think I agree with the rest of the forum on this, snake oil or maybeeeeeee???
Bill
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The water doobries work very well. They change the ionisation of the pipe (or the water) so that limescale is repelled, rather than attracted.
When I was but a humble barrister I was involved in a case in which the inventor of one of these systems was being sued by the Local Standards authority who claimed that it was a scam. We proved inconclusively that his machine was very effective. The S.A. had failed to notice that their own Local Authority had been using this chap's system very effectively for some years. We had the interesting situation in which the borough's Chief Engineer was giving evidence against his own Council.
These machines work by creating a magnetic field through an electric current. I cannot see how a magnet would do the same for petrol; and as for increasing torque........ Well!
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Interesting, looking at the web site, that there is absolutely no way of knowing who these people are - no names, no address. Just a web form to extract money from your credit card!
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A word of warning: the 'axel=4090' bit at the end of the URL could easily be a unique identifier, either for the sender or the recipient. The URL works without it.
By clicking on the link it's quite possible that you've confirmed to the sender of the spam that it's been received, or confirmed to the owner of the web site that the person spamming on their behalf is doing an effective job.
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