If there's a moment in your driving life -- on a curve, up an onramp, away from a stoplight, wherever -- that lets you loosen the reins on your performance vehicle more than the normal so you can really, truly, appreciate what the car can do, then Shell has some expensive new gasoline for you to consider.
That would be the Dutch oil company's V-Power, a 91-Octane juice that replaces the company's current upmarket fuel, Opti-Max Gold, on June 6 at the company's 1,762 Canadian distribution points.
Individual prices will vary by region, of course, but it's likely to cost about a dime or so more than the regular octane fuel, which these days brings it to just this side of $1 a litre. Whether or not this is a price point that will cause the 200,000-odd Canadians who buy premium gas from Shell every week to reconsider their pump choice remains to be seen, but Shell Canada is hopeful it won't.
Indeed, Denita Davis, Shell's manager of public affairs for Ontario, says she thinks ''the new V-Power brand will maybe increase the level of business.''
That could certainly happen, but the fuel pricing situation already has a lot of people who have to feed their performance cars premium to reach those sky-high horsepower and torque levels thinking about a switch to regular gas and max power realities that are somewhat lower but still more than adequate.
To put some hard numbers on this, for the week of May 24, Calgary's MJ Ervin & Associates' survey of over 400 gas stations across Canada put the national price for regular unleaded at 87.6 cents a litre, versus 97.6 cents a litre for premium.
Using a surcharge of 10 cents a litre and Natural Resources Canada's calculation for average fuel use in a year, the cost of using premium fuel in some popular two-seat performance cars is steep.
A Dodge Viper SRT-10 is said to consume 3,100 litres a year of fuel on average, which works out to an extra $310 a year for premium fuel.
To put premium fuel in a Mercedes-Benz SL500 for a year (2,500 litres) would therefore cost $250, or $220 for a Nissan 350Z (2,200 litres), or $214 for a Chevrolet Corvette (2,140 litres), or $210 for a Honda S2000 (2,100).
Engineer Clive McDonald is Shell's point man on this new fuel, traveling the world to talk to the media about it and appearing in TV commercials promoting the company's relationship with the Ferrari F1 team. He's the in the commercials who admits to being scared by racecars.
In an interview, however, McDonald said he understood the desire of many consumers to own a car with some performance edge and those are the folks who won't mind coming up with the extra money to maximize the experience.
The idea of V-Power, says McDonald with a Scottish burr, was to ''generate a product reaped the performance benefits of the car. If you want the best performance from the car, this is the product you should be using. Our argument is that there's no point in offering performance levels related to higher octane, if there's no performance fuel around.''
As for cars with more moderate performance numbers, McDonald claims that they too can benefit from the purchase of V-Power because it will actually remove inlet-system deposits. The knock sensors in modern vehicles are so sophisticated, he says, that they will actually take advantage of running on the more expensive, higher-octane fuel and deliver a little more performance.
That would be the Dutch oil company's V-Power, a 91-Octane juice that replaces the company's current upmarket fuel, Opti-Max Gold, on June 6 at the company's 1,762 Canadian distribution points.
Individual prices will vary by region, of course, but it's likely to cost about a dime or so more than the regular octane fuel, which these days brings it to just this side of $1 a litre. Whether or not this is a price point that will cause the 200,000-odd Canadians who buy premium gas from Shell every week to reconsider their pump choice remains to be seen, but Shell Canada is hopeful it won't.
Indeed, Denita Davis, Shell's manager of public affairs for Ontario, says she thinks ''the new V-Power brand will maybe increase the level of business.''
That could certainly happen, but the fuel pricing situation already has a lot of people who have to feed their performance cars premium to reach those sky-high horsepower and torque levels thinking about a switch to regular gas and max power realities that are somewhat lower but still more than adequate.
To put some hard numbers on this, for the week of May 24, Calgary's MJ Ervin & Associates' survey of over 400 gas stations across Canada put the national price for regular unleaded at 87.6 cents a litre, versus 97.6 cents a litre for premium.
Using a surcharge of 10 cents a litre and Natural Resources Canada's calculation for average fuel use in a year, the cost of using premium fuel in some popular two-seat performance cars is steep.
A Dodge Viper SRT-10 is said to consume 3,100 litres a year of fuel on average, which works out to an extra $310 a year for premium fuel.
To put premium fuel in a Mercedes-Benz SL500 for a year (2,500 litres) would therefore cost $250, or $220 for a Nissan 350Z (2,200 litres), or $214 for a Chevrolet Corvette (2,140 litres), or $210 for a Honda S2000 (2,100).
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| Engineer Clive McDonald is Shell's point man on this new fuel. (photo: Shell) |
In an interview, however, McDonald said he understood the desire of many consumers to own a car with some performance edge and those are the folks who won't mind coming up with the extra money to maximize the experience.
The idea of V-Power, says McDonald with a Scottish burr, was to ''generate a product reaped the performance benefits of the car. If you want the best performance from the car, this is the product you should be using. Our argument is that there's no point in offering performance levels related to higher octane, if there's no performance fuel around.''
As for cars with more moderate performance numbers, McDonald claims that they too can benefit from the purchase of V-Power because it will actually remove inlet-system deposits. The knock sensors in modern vehicles are so sophisticated, he says, that they will actually take advantage of running on the more expensive, higher-octane fuel and deliver a little more performance.