\> Based on your experience do you buy cut rate cheap gasoline; or stick

I buy at places where I get reasonable prices.  I often buy at WalMart
because
the prices are as good as I can usually find.  I will not pay a premium of
40-50 cents per gallon to buy a name brand high test, when my car is spec'ed
for unleaded. And have never had any problems with this.

Recently the local WalMart got their tanks contaminated with diesel, and
that left a number of people stranded. When the accident came to light,
WalMart
stepped up to the plate and did the right thing.

On one occasion, I found a Texaco station that was buying offgrade crap
and selling it as diesel.  I reported it to Texaco corporate, and it was
soon
no longer a Texaco station.  (Texaco lab in Houston did the analysis.)
Texaco behaved honorably in stopping this scam joint.

I think you can occasionally get trashy fuel at any station if an accident
has occurred, but the events are probably rare.

Depends on the cheap gasoline involved.  For the most part, the gas is all
the same, but the additive package is very different.  How much of a problem
that is depends on your car.

If this is the case, I would suspect you have a lot of carbon deposits in
the engine that need to be cleaned out.  If you are getting pinging with
the gasoline recommended for the engine, it's a sign you need to clean
the engine.

Hell, go down to Mexico where people will strain the gas through cheesecloth
before putting it in their tank, and where 87 octane is considered high grade.
Weird thing, I used Pemex Verde in my '86 BMW for a while with no problems
either.  Cheap gas in the US is pretty good in comparison.

Try the cut rate gas.  If you have a problem with that particular brand,
don't use it again.  The absolute worst that can happen is that you'll have
to change your fuel filter.
--scott

There certain can be differences in quality from station to station.
Unfortunately, price is not always a reliable guide.  Kind of pot luck
unless you know station really well.

Buy cheap but stay away from those rundown places with no names.
There was one place in north Houston, Texas, USA, that used to sell
off grade batches - like all toluene, or all xylene.
But they are gone now.

Perhaps more importantly, Buy from a high volume station.

Fresh stock is good!

Gasoline distribution is such that all brands are the same except for the
additive package of detergents and so forth.

Basically each company puts X gallons in to the pipeline and they take X
gallons out of the pipeline at the other end. Odds are it's not the same
X gallons. The additives are then added, if I remember right in the
tanker truck or as the gasoline is going into the tanker.

The difference between brands is rather trivial. Occasionally a higher
name brand gasoline is probably a good thing to get the additives to help
keep things clean but hardly something that needs to be every fill up.

When gasoline prices are going up I often find mobil, shell, BP, etc are
cheaper than citgo, speedway, walmart, etc. At those times I get the name
brand. Sometimes if it's only a one or two cent difference as well.

I have owned quite a few Ford products over the last 30
years.  My first EEC-IV system was in 1986 and from then on,
they have - without exception - ran better and gotten better
mileage with the cheap stuff.  The only fuel related problem
I have had was a load of water from a Shell station a few
years back that shut me down - not a cheapie station or
brand.  We routinely run these things over 200k miles with
no fuel problems.

If your Towncar pings on branded regular and is a 1992 or
newer, it probably needs it's EGR ports and/or the MAF
sensor cleaned.  These are common problems.  It will only
get worse as time goes by wanting more octane because of the
additional deposits.  Get the EGR ports and MAF cleaned and
put it back on regular fuel.  There are pictures of how to
do it on the net.  You will be very pleasantly surprised and
rewarded with greatly improved performance and fuel economy.
The price of the car has little to do with octane
requirement other than the fact that the manufacturers put
the higher performance engines requiring higher octane in
higher priced cars.  Your Towncar is not one of them.

Lugnut

Back when I was a kid and the dinosaurs were still creating petroleum,
there was one oil facility at the outskirts of town, where all the
tanker trucks for all the service stations would fill up. There was a
big tank near the gate labelled "TCP" where the Texaco tankers would
stop for a shot. (remember the days of Texaco with TCP? Remember
Texaco?)

I had a VW Fox that was pretty picky about it's gas.  It was
underpowered and inefficient to begin with, so any loss in power made
it almost useless.  There were times when I first owned it in - about
2002-2003 - when I would floor it and not much would happen.  I
eventually figured out that there were some brands it wouldn't burn.
Marathon and Clark are the names that come to mind.

The GM's I've owned - Tech4 Celebrity, 3.1 V6 Lumina, and 3.4 V6
Impala - all seemed to ping under load with 87 octane but ran fine
with the 89.  The 3.0 V6 Taurus runs equally mediocre on any gas I put
in it.  My guess is that the GM's were slightly more agressively tuned
and so the could wring more out of the gas.

Calvin