Toyota Prius Analysis

With the results of the Prius being what they were, we decided to run another one to verify our results from before. The 2007 Prius was what we got. Since we had tested the 2005 with the stock gap we ran this one with the recommended gap we tell you guys to set them at, but why are we able to get such great results from this already highly efficient car?

The answer was actually staring us in the face but we didn't notice it until the second car was being run. At say 55mph, the rpm of the engine is less with Pulstar plugs installed as opposed to stock plugs. What does this mean for fuel economy though?

Fuel economy is simply with engine load (throttle position) vs RPM vs speed. If our speed stays the same and our throttle position stays the same but RPM drops, we have an increase in fuel economy. In our case the throttle position directly relates to RPM because of the Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) this car is equipped with.

The above graph shows RPM over time. The speed is pretty much fixed because of the drivers trace. You can see that the Pulstar line averages a lower rpm standing than the stock plugs. Amazingly, the engine turns only about 1800 rpm at around 75mph when equipped with Pulstar plugs.

www.pulstar.com

2005 Toyota Prius

When most people think of a 'green car' they think of a hybrid; the most successful and popular being the Toyota Prius. This car is rated from the EPA with a fuel economy of 48MPG city and 45MPG highway and while that is incredibly efficient, we made it better!

I'm only going to briefly go over power numbers with this vehicle, reason being the CVT makes getting a real dyno pull extremely hard to get so the graph above really only shows about 5,000 rpm through a speed range. Dyno testing at wide-open throttle means we are only graphing a slice of the cake as it is and then the CVT keeps the engine at one rpm making for an even smaller sample or 'bite' as you will so our results are really HP and Torque at WOT at 5,000 rpm. Also remember that our power results are the net hybrid output so the electric motor has some say in what was put down.

On to our results. With stock plugs we saw 116HP and 122 Ft-Lbs of torque. Acceleration from 40 to 80 mph took 10.32 seconds and the fuel economy trace consumed 619.3 cc of fuel.

Pulstar plugs installed with a .044 gap yeilded 119HP and 125 Ft-Lbs with acceleration taking 9.79 seconds and the fuel economy test taking 577.7 cc.

Our results are as follows, 3HP (2.59%) increase, 3 Ft-Lbs (2.46%) increase, a reduction of acceleration time by .53 seconds (5.14%) and a reduction in fuel usage of 41.64 cc or 6.72%.

Personally I was suprised at the fuel economy gains we had seeing as the Prius is so efficient from the get go.

1995 BMW 325i

Yesterday we tested a 1995 BMW 325i equipped with a 2.5L L6 engine. This is a popular car from BMW and the 2.5L has been widely used.

Stock Bosch Super Plus FR7LDC plugs installed the engine made 190 Peak HP at 6000 rpm and 182 Peak Ft-Lbs of torque at 4400 rpm. 40 to 80 mph acceleration took 9.45 seconds and the 8.2 mile fuel economy trace took 1173.5 cc to complete.

Pulstar BE-1 plugs installed the engine output climbed to 197 hp at 6000 rpm and 184 Ft-Lbs at 4400 rpm. Acceleration times dropped to 9.39 seconds and the same 8.2 fuel economy trace took only 1080.7 cc to complete.

So, for the results, we gained 7 HP (3.7%) and 2 Ft-Lbs (1.1%) of torque and reduced fuel consumption by 92.7 cc (7.9%). Lets take a look at fuel costs, this car averages about 30MPG overall. That's around 500 gallons a year (assuming 15k miles driven) and at $3.50 a gallon that's $1750 in gas alone to drive the car for a year. If we were to reduce that by 7.9% we save $138.25, almost the entire $163.15 cost of the plugs in the first year. Over the rated life of the plugs you would save $460.37 in fuel costs.

www.pulstar.com

We need cars for testing.

If you have a late model, 2wd, preferably manual transmission or continuously variable transmission (CVT), live around ABQ and can leave your car with us for a day, it's possible that we could use your car for testing.

We would install the Pulstar pulse plugs and run our full test; when we are done you pick up the car. We don't charge you for the plugs or the install and you get a hard copy of all the test results.

A few cars that we are especially interested in are:

Any Hybrid
Mazdaspeed 3
C5 Corvette
Mazda Miata
Honda Civic Si
Acura TSX and RSX
GM displacement on demand vehicles
Vehicles equipped with CVT

If you or anyone you know from a forum or anything are interested in getting some testing done please feel free to e-mail me at kjones@enerpulse.com.

Thank you!

www.pulstar.com

New website launch

This weekend a new version of the website launched.

The old site was heavy on flash animations and while it looked great the majority of users on the internet aren't running top of the line computers that can show a site like that with ease.

I hope you take a look and watch the testing section of our site. There will soon be a new segment to that area of the site that includes brief installation guide and even more detailed testing results than I can offer on here.

www.pulstar.com

Dynamometer Error

In testing, there is always a margin of error that the tester must deal with. Usually, you take a few samples, throw out the number that's high and or low and use the remaining numbers. If we do that, are we still able to take what remains and legitimately say that we see a 2-6 horsepower increase and it isn't just dyno error.

Above is the dyno results from a 2004 Acura RSX Type-S. Stock plugs vs Pulstar plugs we saw an 8 HP peak increase and a 2 Ft-Lb peak torque increase. I took all 3 runs from the stock test and 3 from the Pulstar test and superimposed the graphs on top of each other. You can see the numbers at the bottom are skewed because of the differing results from the runs.

The grouping is very good, a definite indicator of the consistency of our dyno runs, even the 2 pound increase in peak torque can be differentiated between the two types of plugs. Most of our tests look like this. We do have some that literally superimpose each other so the 3 results printed looks like one run.

www.pulstar.com

Independent Verification

We get asked about independent tests quite a bit here. This is to be expected with the amount of products aimed towards the 'automotive enthusiast' that are completely bogus products. They sometimes make perfect sense in theory but when it comes to feeling or noticing any benefit you never can tell, usually because there is nothing to feel.

The following links are what we have as of today, March 11th, 2008. Remember, we didn't provide them the information they published, they did their own testing. I know that's a given seeing as it's independent testing but if I don't say it a lot of people just assume it true.

DSport Magazine has published their results in the March 2008 issue. We have a pdf copy of those pages here.

Modified Magazine published their short test in the April 2008 issue available here in pdf format.

Sparkplugs.com did a test using a Neon SRT-4 here.

Change2E85.com makes E85 conversion kits for vehicles and noticed a very decent increase in fuel economy in their tests.

www.pulstar.com