What is fuel injection?
Looking through the collector car ads for an unrealistically great deal on a Ferrari (something moto-weenies do on a regular basis) one notices that the typical price for a used 󈨔 308GTS differs substantially from the price on a &821782 308GTSi; usually the GTSi carries about a $5,000 price premium. So what gives? Is that little i really worth an extra 5K?Well, as you might have already guessed, the i is a European designation meaning “injecktione;” as in fuel injection. And if you can get it on a Ferrari, or on any car, for a mere $5,000 over the price of a carbureted model, consider it a bargain.What makes electronic fuel injection, or EFI, so much better than carburetion, and why is it used almost exclusively by today’s automobile manufacturers? To answer that, you must first understand the basic components that make up a modern fuel injection system. First there’s a computer module that acts as the “brains” of the system. This module is fed information from a number of senso
Fuel injection is a replacement for the carburetors that were around since the dawn of the automobile. There are many basic types of fuel injection, but we should start by saying what a fuel injector is – it’s basically an atomizer, something that sprays a mist of gasoline into the air. This helps the gas to mix better with the air and stay in an even suspension, so that it burns more evenly and creates less pollution and more power. (Think of cooking spray vs. melting butter on the bottom of a pan). The first fuel injection systems were mechanical, but electronic fuel injection, where the pulse width (the length of time the injector is spraying fuel) is controlled by a computer, was actually used as early as 1958 in a DeSoto named the Electrojector. That system failed, with disastrous consquences for American use of the technology, largely due to the lack of stable, durable electronic components; its design was actually surprisingly similar to modern systems. There are two basic types
