Americans Are Wasting $2.1 Billion A Year On Premium Gasoline, Study Says

Do you have a car that takes regular fuel, but you like to fill it up with the premium stuff every once in a while? You're throwing money down the drain, according to a new study.

Americans waste more than $2 billion a year filling up their cars with premium gas when the regular stuff will do, a new study from AAA shows. Premium gas doesn't improve performance in any way for cars that don't require it, so any extra money spent on it is a total waste, the analysis found.

"Drivers see the ‘premium’ name at the pump and may assume the fuel is better for their vehicle,” John Nielsen, AAA’s managing director of Automotive Engineering and Repair, said in a AAA press release. “AAA cautions drivers that premium gasoline is higher octane, not higher quality, and urges drivers to follow the owner’s manual recommendations for their vehicle’s fuel.”

How did the study work?

First, AAA partnered with the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Automotive Research Center to do test runs of cars that had a V-8, V-6 or I4 engine — all engines that take regular gasoline — and did test runs with regular 87-octane and premium 93-octane fuel.

They tested the cars on a dynamometer, which works sort of like a treadmill for cars, to see how they performed on fuel economy, emissions and horsepower.

There was no significant difference using premium instead of regular fuel, "indicating the practice of using premium gasoline when it’s not required for the vehicle offers no advantage," the AAA release said.

Armed with this knowledge, AAA conducted a nationwide survey to determine people's fueling habits.

Here's what the survey found:

• Among U.S. car owners, 70 percent own cars that run on regular gasoline, while 16 percent need premium, 10 percent use mid-grade gas and 4 percent use an alternate energy source.
• In the last 12 months, 16.5 million used premium gas where regular gas would have sufficed and did this an average of once a month.
• In those 12 months, drivers did this 270 million times.

AAA used that survey data and applied it to a U.S. consumer survey, Federal Highway Administration data, fuel costs and average number of yearly fill-ups to determine that people in the U.S. waste about $2.1 billion using premium fuel when they don't need to.

Patch has reached out to AAA for more information, and we'll let you know when we hear back.

You can read the AAA study here.

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