NOTE: This thread concerns the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; not internal combustion engines.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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What would exactly happen if one woule pour sugar in the gas tank? Like on a chemical and mechanical level?
First time hearing about this
It's a myth perpetuated by people who don't know better. By all means, putting sugar in a gas tank is not advised because, well, sugar doesn't belong in there. But it will not ruin the engine. If it even reaches the engine, you have a pretty bad fuel filter.
Does salad oil work?
bleach will do some interesting things
Bleach in the oil was the destruction method mandated by Cash for Clunkers if I remember correctly.
Man, I hate that program. Destroying tons of cool classic cars and making used cars in general needlessly expensive. Absolutely wasteful and counterproductive. I mean, sure, !fuckcars, but not like that!
If they wanted to stimulate the economy that bad they should've increased spending on bike/ped/transit infrastructure or something like that instead.
Honestly I am still convinced that it was a handout, though not directly, to the auto industry because Obama had campaigned on saving Detroit but the bailouts weren’t enough to keep GM and Chrysler afloat. (Ford, in a business move that I wish was more common but also because they were dying before the recession, leveraged the blue oval logo as collateral on a loan.)
It was totally a handout, pretty much explicitly:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/04/05/did-cash-clunkers-work-intended
Dish soap mixed with a small amount of water would probably fuck up an engine.
Dish soap and Vinegar also makes an excellent fruit fly trap. Apple Cider is even better than Vinegar
Nothing. Sugar is not soluble in hydrocarbons and the particles would be caught by the fuel filter. You'd have to replace the filter and clean the fuel tank, but the engine would be fine. Might as well use dirt instead of sugar to achieve the same effect.
Well then you would uh... ice ICE's ICE.
bad dum tish!
Not really though, basically, it clogs up the fuel pump/filter.
Not likely to... immediately or quickly immobilize the vehicle... but it would increase maintenance costs, and decrease fuel efficiency and reliability.
...
If you wanna go for something uh... faster acting, more immediate and more serious:
A whole lot of water.
That'll make the engine choke and sputter and stall if you use enough.
So... use ice to ice ICE's ICE?
Uh... in minecraft?
...
Sand will also clog up the filter, and cause more damage inside the actual engine if any gets through the filter.
... A whole bunch of polystyrene packing peanuts would ... also be 'fun', rofl.
The way they chemically interact with gasoline... basically gellifies the gasonline, turning it into shitty, syrupy napalm.
I am guessing a very gooopy gasoline is... not going to help a car run well, please actually do not test this rofl.
I am not a chemist, but uh chat gpt says polystyrene + gasoline is an exothermic reaction... so that... generates heat... and gasses... and that could be bad... in a tightly sealed container...
😅
Make sure there's no small pockets of flourine gas sealed inside of packing peanuts before using them.
That would be very bad for everyone within 100' of the vehicle.
That's not a thing at all. Fluorine would react with the peanuts before anything else. There's no fluorine in the peanuts themselves either. So dissolving them would also not release fluorine.
Please don't spread incorrect information.
Oh dear god, does... is that a thing that happens with polystyrene? Fluorine gas pockets?
See, I am not a chemist, but I have enough basic chemistry knowledge to know you do not fuck around with fluorine.
Like I legitimately wasn't kidding when I said 'dont actually do this.'
No. It does not happen. I don't know what they're smoking. Not fluorine though, because they'd be dead already.
We call table salt “salt” even though that’s a generic name for any metal bonded with a non metallic mineral (for instance potassium chloride). Sugar is the same, table sugar is just one kind of sugar. “Sugar” is the generic name for a type of carbohydrate. Ethanols found in gasoline can degrade into a sugar over time (like in a mower left out over the winter) and this will leave a fine white powder in the engine that will cause scaring when the engine is started. Thus sugar can ruin your engine, but is more likely to increase wear. This has perpetuated an urban legend that you can force this by putting table sugar in a gas tank.
See the longer response from another user, they're correct. Just wanted to say table sugar is sucrose (a combination of fructose and glucose if I remember correctly). But you will not create sugars in the process you're talking about.
I realize (and you mentioned) that sugar is not a well defined term, but calling degradation products of ethanol in gas "sugars" is still a bit of a stretch. Ethanol by itself usually forms some combination of acetaldehyde, acetic acid, 2-carbon peroxides, and CO2 (i.e. not sugars) upon autoxidation, though those species can react with other components of gasoline to form the precipitated "gum". The structure of gum in the literature is pretty hand-wavy (high MW materials kinda just be like that sometimes) but tends to be much more more oxygen-deficient than conventional "sugars" (polysaccharides) even for ethanol blends and contains a wider variety of substructures. Though, I have seen some papers talking about certain microbes that can ferment the ethanol in gasoline, possibly via sugars, but I don't think that's the common degradarion pathway for a mower.
~~Oh, it just gums everything up. The fuel doesn't combust as well, and the pistons get sticky, among other things.~~
EDIT: I was wrong. It clogs the fuel filter, the same way sand would.
This is, at best, a myth. Sugar doesn’t dissolve in gasoline. There may be trace amounts of water in the tank too, but not enough to dissolve a meaningful amount of sugar. All it will realistically do is clog their fuel filter, the same way sand would.
What about if you poured a considerable amount of syrup in there instead?
I'm assuming this syrup is a thick aqueous solution of sugar, in which case it would settle on the bottom of the fuel tank without mixing with the gasoline. If it did get into the engine, it would likely clog the injector or carburetor, but it would likely just cause the engine to stall from fuel starvation, or blow the fuel pump's fuse.
Maybe that's the idea, then. My apologies.
Gasoline can be up to 10% ethanol now. Does sugar dissolve into that?
no