Fuelstar. Scam, only good for extracting money from the wallets of the gullible. Fuelstar is a company run by Ian Cornelius that makes a tin-based "fuel combustion catalyst" that will give a guaranteed 12% fuel saving. It does not work. Even the best of their test reports only show that engines are more efficient when maintained well, such as the test by the dodgy California Environment Engineering (which has given apparently favourable results for many bogus fuel-saving products, but tries to gloss over the vehicle maintenance done at the same time as the device is installed). The only reason Fuelstar is not given a Danger rating is because it probably won't do you any physical harm. Although the various tin compounds likely produced by combustion are toxic the concentration is probably too low to be detected or they are insignificant compared to all the other toxic chemicals in vehicle exhaust anyway. A competing version available in Australia and New Zealand is called Fuelmate, while other similar products are called Broquet and Carbonflo.

There are a few general ways that you can easily tell that Fuelstar, Fuelmate and other similar products are scams:

• No scientific explanation – no reason is given (or exists) for how it works.
• Pseudoscience explanations – little or no genuine scientific support for the apparently scientific claims that are made. Examples are dodgy tests and scientific-sounding gobbledygook. (Note that pseudoscience gobbledygook can be hard to recognise for those without a scientific background.)
• Defies good science – there are often easy to find scientific reasons why it doesn't work. For example:
  • Too little active ingredient consumed to have a chemically significant effect. (For Fuelstar, tin is the active ingredient.)
• Defies common sense – there are often easy to find common sense reasons why it won't work as well as claimed. For example:
  • Too good to be true – claims to work well or equally well on any engine size or type, whether petrol, diesel, or LPG, in any application (eg, large diesel truck or small petrol generator).
  • Not used by those who would gain the most if it were true – the product claims benefits that industry would snap up if the benefits were real. (No car manufacturer includes a tin combustion catalyst in their vehicle fuel lines.)
• Excessive cost – retail cost completely disproportionate to the cost of materials. (In the case of Fuelstar there's perhaps $2.70 to $5.40 of tin in them but they sell for hundreds of dollars.)
• Marketed mainly by anecdotal evidence – the "it worked for me" personal accounts without rigorous objective testing or measurement or control of variables.

Some of these points are investigated in this Fuelstar Scam article.

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Printed on 18 December 2019 at www.cults.co.nz.
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