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Comment by fuzzer37 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if you've run into any issues (Or worried about) cycling gas that long. I know that gas can "go bad" over the span of 6 months - 1 year. Do you ever intentionally run the gas, just so you can burn some and put new in?

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In a modern sealed automotive fuel tank gas isn't going bad in 6mo. Most fuel injected cars will run on years old gas well enough.

Your lawn equipment with its poorly sealed fuel tank and carburetor is a different story.

Gas doesn't go bad as fast as people pretend. Yes it has lost a bit of octane rating sitting around, but unless you are driving a 30+ year old performance engine with high compression your car isn't going to notice the loss of a few octane points. Anything within the last 15 years measures and adjusts for fuel octane rating automatically and won't care, and anything non-performance that is older was designed expecting fuel octane to be lower than what it is sold as. Also these days most places add 10% ethanol to all pump gas which has a higher octane than gasoline and is replacing some of the old high-octane components of fuel that evaporated and caused gas to go bad sooner.

It has a pressurized gas tank. The way I found out about the Pacifica plug-in was when I rented a conventional one, and noticed that it also has a pressurized gas tank.

I usually do a 180 mile round trip once a month in mine, so I don't need to worry about bad gas.

After a certain amount of time (and/or some other conditions) the Pacifica hybrid will go into "fuel and oil refresh mode" while you are driving and start using the fuel to run the engine.

As someone else noted, it will occasionally go into fuel and oil refresh mode and run the engine if it doesn't happen naturally.

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