Sports Car Net

I’ve debated with people for a long time during my ownership of my mustang on whether or not to use premium or regular. I’ve herd many arguments made that unlike its other models, like the cobra, that it did not in fact require premium to run well. In fact, I had herd only arguments for using regular at first, so I started using regular, and at first they seemed to be right.

However after some time, I myself started noticing some issues with my car… in particular that it would stall while idling more frequently than I cared for it to do. I was told this could be the result of bad gas, so I moved to other gas stations hoping for better results, but with no luck. Finally one day I decided to try using premium again, and see if that would solve the problems I was having, and within 2 weeks and every day since I hadn’t had any problems.

After telling this story to those who argued that regular was what I should be using, they were still not buying into my logic. Simply put, they said a mustang GT would not run any worse with regular, and I even had someone say it would run better with regular. The arguments eventually boiled down to me saying that the small amount more paid for premium was worth it for me to put my mind at ease.

Recently I made a trip from New Jersey to North Carolina and back, which happened to be exactly a 600 mile trip. I noticed a few things during this trip.

1. I got amazing mileage on the highway (23-26 vs my 16-19 city)
2. That I used almost exactly 2 full tanks of gas to make this trip.

On my return I decided to perform a little experiment, I would use one full tank of regular, and one full tank of premium and compare results. The results were quite shocking. Using regular I got about ~23 MPG, and using premium I got about ~25 MPG. I thought right away, that I finally had some proof that a Mustang GT would perform better with premium, and not only that I considered it might even be cheaper to use premium in the long run. I did some math and came up with the following:

1 Gallon of Regular cost $2.999 for $3 for ease. 1 Gallon of Premium costs about .30 more, so $3.30. If you used exactly 40 dollars with both you get ~13.33 gallons with regular, and ~12.12 gallons with premium. Multiply that by the mileage, and you get 306 miles with 40 dollars on regular, and 303 miles with the same amount using premium.

Not quite more efficient, but this does prove at least one thing. The mileage gained using premium makes up for its cost, and if my suspicions are right you will perform better with it as well.
So final thoughts: If you have a Ford Mustang GT, I would strongly suggest using premium, despite what other may say.