Fool me three times, you can fool me forever?

Sounds like a quote from our genius in chief but really, it seems to be true. Times of relatively high fuel prices and shrinking affluence have brought back scams that were popular off and on since the 1920’s. Yesterday someone forwarded me a story about a couple who were surprised to see that their brand new mini van was getting something on the order of 100 mpg on a long highway trip. Soon, returning from a rest stop, they spied some men in black hoods removing a device from their car and running away. Of course, the van began to get much more ordinary mileage.

I didn’t bother to look this one up in any of the hoax databases, because that story has been around since the Great Depression. It never happened. The sinister oil interests aren’t sitting on a cheap black box that will give your Hummer 200mpg or that will allow it to run on water. Mothballs in your gas tank didn’t help the Ford Model T and it won’t help your Toyota to get better mileage. Neither will magnets on the fuel line, little spinning gadgets in the air intake, things that clip on the spark plugs or distributor. Aerodynamic devices glued on to your Honda Civic do nothing but create drag and waste gas.

As a teenager, I used to laugh about the things that promised nearly perpetual motion results advertised in mail order catalogs and wonder about who was dumb enough to buy them as they had all been debunked regularly for decades. That doesn’t stop the business of marketing them and faith based drivers often do claim to see a difference in mileage, but according to a test done by CNN along with Popular Mechanics magazine and auto mechanics from the Universal Technical Institute in Houston, Texas, the devices don’t work and usually degrade mileage.

Rocky Rothwell and his wife Liz, a retired couple from Florida having no background in chemistry, physics or engineering and who probably did their homework in high school instead of reading J.C. Whitney catalogs like me, were taken in by a multi level marketing scheme selling green mothballs to improve mileage. The Texas attorney General recently shut down the company ( who still claim that it works) but not soon enough to save the Rothwells and others.

There are of course ways to save on gas, the most obvious one being not to drive like me. You can inflate your tires for instance, you may notice a true improvement and if you have a lot of disposable income you can buy expensively machined cylinder heads, add less restrictive exhaust and intake components and do some sophisticated computer reprogramming although you may well be accused of “illegal tampering.” It hardly pays however, if mileage is all you’re interested in and you’ll most likely have to use high octane gas.

There is no free lunch, but there are cheaper lunches. There are ways to use less oil that don’t involve exotic technology, but all of them require some big changes in the way we live and where we live. I’m not looking forward to it but I'm not getting fooled by the same city slickers that scammed my grandfather's generation.