How To Spot A Psychopath

Modern Mechanix has been so good as to reprint the Popular Mechanics article BEWARE The Gasoline DOPE Racket, describing a bunch of worthless fuel additives which are, in promises and even in composition, the same darn thing that umpteen companies are still selling to suckers today. (Regular readers of this blog may be able to name at least one of these companies.)

The date of the article?

November, 1936.

(See also “Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Shown at Chicago Fair“, from September 1934.)

LED lamps for standard low-power automotive sockets - things like interior lights, number-plate illuminators and brake lights - are now widely available and dirt cheap.

So I bought one, to see if it works any better than the standard interior light in my car.

There was nothing wrong with the standard interior light, but like a lot of low-power automotive bulbs, it’s offensively inefficient.

The bulbs used in cars for things like interior lighting and instrument panel illumination have as their two chief design goals cheapness and durability. Both of these goals push manufacturers towards very low-efficiency devices. And the standard “dome” light in the middle of the ceiling of most cars generally doesn’t even have much of a reflector behind its bulb, so something approaching half of the light just goes into warming up the light fitting.

So the dome light in my car looked like a fine candidate for LED improvement to me. Particularly now that one lamp will only cost you $AU8.98 delivered from Hong Kong.

(I got mine from this eBay seller.)

My car’s interior light uses the small 31mm size of “festoon” bulb, the kind that look like a glass fuse but with points on the metal caps on each end.

The 31mm form factor doesn’t give a lot of room for modern super-LEDs. You can now get 31mm lamps with a single allegedly-one-watt white LED in them…

…or you can go for the type I got, with no fewer than six surface-mount sub-1-watt super-LEDs.

There are also replacement bulbs that use a cluster of standard 5mm LEDs. They may be OK for things like instrument panel lighting, but you shouldn’t expect as much light as you’ll get from a single 1W LED unless there are at least a dozen 5mm LEDs in there. Even then, it’s doubtful.

If you don’t see a lot of yellow phosphor looking back at you, you’re probably not looking at a very bright lamp.

I gave the new bulb a whirl on my bench power supply to see how much power it consumed. Then I tried the same thing with the (rather old) stock bulb.

The LED lamp drew only about 55 milliamps (mA) at twelve volts, for a power rating of only about 0.66 watts. Raising the supply voltage to 13.8V - which is what you’ll get when the car’s running and the alternator’s turning - raised the current draw to about 105mA, for 1.45 watts.

The stock bulb has a nominal ten watt rating. From 12V it drew around 0.725A - that’s 8.7W. From 13.8V it drew only a little more, about 0.785A (this is because the resistance of light bulb filaments rises with their temperature), giving 10.83 watts.

I expected the LED lamp to deliver much more light per watt than the incandescent bulb, and it also gets a big effectiveness boost from only throwing light out one side, wasting none of it by shooting it uselessly into the dome light fitting. But this was still a pretty huge power difference. At 13.8V, the old bulb draws 7.5 times as much power as the LED lamp; at 12V it draws more than thirteen times as much.

It was pretty easy to install the new lamp, although it did turn out to be a bit longer than it was supposed to be, making it a bit of a tight fit and also making it impossible to install it perfectly level. It ended up tilted a bit toward the left seat, though not enough to make a huge difference to the illumination on the two sides.

To cancel out any side bias, I tested the brightness of the two lamps with my somewhat accurate light meter sitting at the base of the gearshift (and with the standard plastic diffuser in place, too).

The light meter is calibrated in lux, a unit that’s weighted to match human brightness perception. This gives the LED lamp another advantage, because the long-life low-temperature incandescent bulb gives very yellow light, while the LED lamp gives the characteristic blue-white of “white” LEDs. The blue-white has more energy around the green frequencies where human vision works best, so a given raw energy level of yellow-white light will appear dimmer, and read lower on a luxmeter, than the same energy level of blue-white.

Anyway, the stock bulb gave a reading of about six lux with the engine off (13V), and about nine lux with the engine running. Not a bad illumination level, given that it was being measured quite a bit lower than the place where you’d typically be, say, holding a map you were trying to read.

Swapping in the LED lamp gave… exactly the same readings!

My light meter isn’t terribly accurate down in the single-digit lux, so I won’t swear to you that there wasn’t actually a bit of a difference one way or the other. But there clearly isn’t a huge difference. And the new lamp, subjectively, lit up the cabin of the car just fine. Despite drawing around a tenth as much power.

This sort of thing can make a big difference in certain circumstances. If, for instance, you have a typical small car battery with about 25 amp-hour capacity before it starts getting very unhappy, a ten-watt interior light will drain it in thirty hours. Swap to a one-watt LED lamp and you’ll probably still be able to start the car even if you leave the light on for ten days.

This doesn’t matter much for normal automotive interior lighting, but if you’ve got a caravan or motor home or something that has a lot of friendly yellow incandescent bulbs in it, it could be a very good idea to swap them for the new cheap LEDs.

Stephen Moss, CEO of Firepower International, hasn’t breathed a word about suing me since starting our correspondence with that threat. But he sent me a report yesterday. It was apparently done for Firepower by a Shell laboratory in Germany.

Just like all the best scientific studies, this one is a big secret, so I’m not allowed to make it available for download.

The test was of some substance referred to as “Polyfuel Type #1″, which was a thick gelly that had to be mixed with quite a lot of diesel before it became liquid enough to be poured into a fuel tank.

(Note - I originally said “jelly” in the above sentence, rather than using the non-word “gelly” which featured in the original report, specifically in the phrase “…which resulted in a gelly-like composition.” I presumed that this spelling was just a typo or a German translation glitch or something, but apparently the use of the letter J in that word greatly angered someone representing himself as being from Firepower. He then contacted Blogsome and made a number of demands, one of which was that I change the spelling to what it said in the original. No problem, Mister Firepower Spelling Expert!)

Mr Moss tells me that this thick… gelly… was actually just what you get when the almost-on-sale “Firepower Pill” is ground up and mixed with diesel fuel, and it was presented this way to make the test easier.

Since the report says the gelly had to be pre-mixed, for some time, with ten litres of diesel before it was thin enough to use, this raises some obvious questions about what the heck the Firepower Pill actually is. I’m also personally willing to bet that if you crush one of the (rather small) Firepower Pills and put it in some diesel yourself, you will not get any sort of gelly, or even jelly. Mr Moss has offered me some Pills to test for myself; I may take him up on that, just to see if they do gel diesel, or petrol, or anything else.

Anyway, whatever the heck it was that they were actually testing did, according to this report which Moss says I may not distribute, reduce the fuel consumption of a Volvo FM12 truck, in a proper rolling-road drive cycle test, by about four per cent. Less on the highway cycle, more on the city-street cycle, where the engine was occasionally idling. Emissions improved, slightly, too.

So we’ve got a test of something that I have to trust Mr Moss was in some way related to the Pill they’re now (almost) selling, on a large diesel vehicle (the Firepower Pill is meant to work on any petrol or diesel vehicle), which showed only a 4% fuel economy improvement, versus the 10%-to-30% claims Firepower make on their site and in their proudly presented anecdotal evidence.

In our correspondence, Moss has trotted out the “unburned fuel” fallacy, and stuck to it with some enthusiasm, even though Total Hydrocarbon (”THC”; quiet, you boys in the back row) emissions figures make clear that almost all of the fuel that goes into any modern engine is fully combusted.

The secret Shell report itself makes this clear. Here’s a darn great diesel truck, consuming much more fuel per kilometre than a passenger car, yet even on the urban cycle where it’s occasionally not moving at all (and before the magic Firepower substance was administered) it still only emitted 0.456 grams of THC per kilometre. It consumed 0.422 litres of fuel per kilometre on that test, which has a density of about 850 grams per litre, so it burned about 358 grams of diesel, and emitted less than half a gram unburned.

In other words, the worst it ever managed was burning 99.87% of the fuel that went into it.

Now, according to the report the 0.456 gram-per-kilometre THC figure dropped to only 0.389g/km when the Firepower concoction was added to the fuel; reducing THC emissions by 15% is a good thing, as long as there are no hidden downsides. But the notion that this reflects a more complete burning of the fuel which could have some perceptible effect on power or economy is ridiculous, since 15% of 0.13% is, to a first approximation, bugger all.

Mr Moss went on to favour me with the “catalyst” fallacy, which I have addressed on previous occasions, including the very first time my then-so-innocent eyes fell upon Firepower, back in 2006. In brief: The common fuel-additive claim that it makes the fuel burn faster (from the buyfirepowerpill.com site: “Treated fuel burns 25-30% faster…”), or more easily, is nonsense. Fuel in a modern engine already burns pretty much optimally; if it burns faster or lights more easily, all that’ll give you is engine knock, which is a bad thing.

Mr Moss also had a go at the “engine cleaning” fallacy, and just when I was wondering if I perhaps wouldn’t be hearing it, the “conspiracy theory” fallacy as well. And he reiterated his great fondness for anecdotes.

And that, plus this super secret report I’m not allowed to show you, is all he’s got.

Tim Johnston, the Chairman of Firepower Holding Group, has been selling fuel pills with these same claims since 1992.

Mr Moss seems to be distancing his outfit, Firepower International, from Tim Johnston - he told me that “Firepower International is not owned by Firepower Group, I think some articles have made the mistake of assuming we are the same entity. Firepower International is privately owned by a collection of investors and owns the worldwide rights to the Firepower Pill.”

(And interestingly, a reader’s just pointed out to me that the firepowerinternational.com domain is actually registered to Stephen Moss.)

But Firepower International, or Group, or Whoever, have all engaged in conspicuous displays of wealth - sponsoring sports teams and, Mr Moss insists, actually buying the million-dollar Rolls-Royce he was until recently depicted next to on the buyfirepowerpill.com site.

So you’d think that at some point over the last several years they might have found the time to spend a measly hundred grand on used cars to hand, along with some Firepower Pills, to an automobile association or technical college or something for proper testing.

But no. The Australian Automobile Association say they’d love to talk to Firepower, but over the whole of last year Firepower have unaccountably failed to pick up the phone.

So that’s it. The crowning jewel of Firepower’s evidence is this one secret report from 2004, of a substance that resembles their Pills in no way whatsoever, and which found not even half of the smallest benefit that Firepower allege is commonplace in all sorts of vehicles.

Mr Moss keeps urging me to just try the magic Firepower pills in my own car, whereupon he says I’ll be unable to deny the obvious power gains, if not the improvement in fuel economy.

But countless people - probably millions of people - have tried snake-oil fuel products in the past and been convinced of just those improvements, because they wanted to see them. They wouldn’t have bought the darn stuff in the first place if they didn’t think it was at least likely to work; that belief sets you straight on the train to a textbook case of confirmation bias.

Even if the product is something that’s actively harmful at best, like Slick 50, you can find a long queue of people who’ll swear, hand on heart, that it works.

You can also, of course, find a long queue of people who’ll swear that using an electric fan in a closed room is deadly dangerous, that elves are real, or that a fence post near Coogee Beach was an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

(I have personally witnessed that last queue. But not Mary.)

The first principle of science, though, is that you must not fool yourself - because you are the easiest person to fool. If you do an unblinded, uncontrolled test like just dropping a pill into your petrol tank and driving around, you can very easily completely fail to get any closer to the truth than if your test involved throwing darts at a piece of graph paper.

We’ve been working on science for about the last 400 years, and it’s really worked out quite well. If you’re lucky enough to live in a First World country, practically everything you see, touch and do on a daily basis is either entirely the product of, or has been almost unrecognisably improved by, science.

And science is hard. But it’s worth it.

It’s long past time for Firepower to put up or shut up.

It’s not just me and the Herald who’ve been paying attention to Firepower lately.

(Actually, I’d pretty much forgotten about them, until their CEO threatened to sue me yesterday.)

Here’s a Webdiary piece that sums up the strangeness that is Firepower, including the previous versions of their fuel pill. All these years, and it still hasn’t set the world alight.

Here’s a piece on Gas Week that asks, among other things, why almost $400,000 of Australian taxpayers’ money seems to have been handed over to these people. And here’s Gerard Ryle, the Herald journalist, summing up the story as it stood early last year, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Science Show. Firepower’s science doesn’t seem to have moved on in the interim.

Here’s a piece about the Australian Automobile Association trying to get Firepower - or any of the several other, lower profile, fuel-pill makers active in Australia at the moment - to submit to proper testing. That was a year ago, and Firepower said then that they hadn’t even noticed that the AAA had called. I wonder if they’ve answered the phone yet?

Oh, and much the same “results” that were presented to me in PDF form just yesterday were shown to Crikey a year ago, in great secrecy. Crikey weren’t very impressed, either.

M’verygoodfriend Joel Johnson at gadgets.boingboing.net could, I think it’s fair to say, be more impressed with the CEO of Firepower International.

(I’m basing this assessment on the idea that “blowhard dickbag” is an insult. Do tell me if I’m wrong.)

Rob Beschizza of the Wired blog has also picked up the story, taking the time to Photoshop the Firepower logo a bit, and writing a disappointingly sober piece on the subject of Firepower-esque scams in general.

Oh, sure, it’s all very sensible, Rob. But how are we supposed to take you seriously if you haven’t called anyone a cockmonger?

And now, on to the “results” which Stephen Moss, the sue-happy CEO of Firepower, has commanded me to publicise, on pain of being sued for defamation.

Those results were presented in a generously proportioned PDF file which he attached to his threatening letter. He told me to make it available for download, and at no point did he complain about the fact that I did so - but apparently some OTHER person from Firepower decided to threaten Blogsome (not me, my blog hosts - classy!) with legal action for doing what the CEO told me to do, so now you’ll find no link to the file here.

(If only I had some other Web site on which you might find more information about this…)

The PDF, mildly hilariously, has a line on the bottom of every page telling you it was created with the unregistered version of deskPDF PDF Writer, a piece of software which costs only $US19.95 to register.

I remind you that Stephen Moss is a fellow currently depicted on buyfirepowerpill.com as putting a fuel pill in “his” 2007 Rolls Royce Phantom LWB, a vehicle which costs $AU1,095,000 here in Australia, or 49,130 times as much as a registered copy of deskPDF.

Classy.

Aaaanyway, on to the Results!

Page 9 of the PDF alleges that the Firepower treatments actually did slightly raise the octane number of some fuel. This makes no difference whatsoever, unless you’ve got a car that changes its ignition timing when it’s running on higher-octane fuel, in which case you should just be buying high-octane fuel in the first place. The Firepower treatments didn’t manage to increase octane numbers by nearly enough to turn cheaper lower-octane fuel into the more expensive stuff, anyway.

(You can raise a fuel’s octane count by adding all sorts of substances to it. I write about this in more detail in this post.)

Page 10 of the PDF contains a statement from a German laboratory that says Firepower additives did not do fuel any harm they could notice, and goes on to specifically state that it’s making no claims about fuel consumption or engine life.

Page 13 claims that the “Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research” found that Firepower treatments massively reduced all kinds of engine emissions, by (according to page 12) greatly reducing fuel consumption.

These results, if correct, make Firepower products far and away the greatest breakthrough in automotive science of the last twenty years, at least. Maybe the last fifty.

But since there is, yet again, not the slightest clue as to who at the abovementioned Institute did the tests, when, and how, and since Firepower have previously admitted that when they said tests were done “by Volvo” what they actually meant was they were done, um, on Volvo trucks (that result gets one line on page 25 of the PDF!), I remain unconvinced.

Honestly - giant fuel economy differences like this are the sort of thing you could test in any technical college. You could just send a free tube of fuel pills to every TAFE in Australia that has an engine on a test stand, and within a month you’d be sitting on a pile of beautiful replicated results that you could take to Toyota or whoever.

Even if Firepower’s additives only turned out to reduce world oil consumption by 10% - an easy feat, you’d think, given the much larger improvements shown in many of their testimonials - that’d save something in the order of nine million barrels of oil per day.

At current oil prices, that’s more than eight hundred million US dollars.

Per day.

And yet Firepower are still messing around with photocopies of photocopies from some guy in Oman, and sending lawsuit threats to some bloke with a blog who dares to wonder why they seem so interested in selling fuel pills in packs of ten to individual motorists, and so uninterested in grabbing their entirely fair half share of the $US300 billion per year they could easily be saving the world.

Fuel-pill companies, of course, always do this. They make their florid claims, they allude to lab tests the details of which are apparently secret, they say that testimonials are all the evidence they need, and they sell to whoever’ll believe the flimsy evidence they offer, rather than putting together proper evidence and becoming richer than Queen Elizabeth.

Every time, they do this. Over and over. For the last hundred years, if not longer.

(They often come up with a conspiracy theory, too. I don’t think Firepower have done this yet, but give ‘em time.)

But let’s get back to the Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research (SISIR) report on Firepower’s products.

When do you suppose that test was done?

Well, I can only suppose it was done before 1996, because that when SISIR ceased to exist. But don’t worry - I can totally see how those sloppy, unorganised Singaporeans might have still been publishing research reports on old letterhead a decade later.

Or was the SISIR report, perhaps, used as supporting evidence for one of the Firepower principal’s several previous fuel additive companies, all of which made much the same claims but none of which, all the way back to the early 1990s, have amounted to anything?

I’m speculating, here, but that’s what you have to do when all you’re given is a big happy bar graph and the name of an institution that hasn’t existed for almost 12 years.

Page 14 of the PDF starts a long series of accounts of alleged fuel economy and emissions improvements, sometimes presented as bald claims with no tracking information at all (apparently Firepower products did great things for “Railways, Minsk” in March 2006…), sometimes as anecdotes that are at least on someone’s letterhead with a signature, and with the occasional “this additive didn’t mess up the fuel” certificate thrown in for spice.

Some of these accounts do at least allege that some sort of proper drive cycle test has been done.

On page 15, there’s a test allegedly by the Russian Ministry of Defence, saying a Firepower product worked on a T72 tank, with what looks like some sort of controlled test. Page 16 says someone called Professor Evgeny Kossov of the Research Institute of the Russian Railways found considerable improvements in a long-term test, which at least could have been properly controlled, on one locomotive. And then page 18 has a signed testimonial from someone in Oman attesting to massive fuel savings in a generator, with a description of what would be a controlled test if it were actually done, and if nobody cheated, and if the meters all worked right - but what am I going to do, call Hamed Salim Al-Magdheri’s mother and ask her if her son’s prone to lying?

And then, on page 21, there’s a testimonial, dated November 1999, from a Lieutenant Colonel in the New Zealand Army. It’s a bit funny that they left that in, since the New Zealand military is one of several major organisations which has said they actually have no record of ever having any connection or contracts with Firepower.

I suppose some bloke in the Army might have bought some fuel treatment stuff himself and formed the opinion that it worked without telling anyone else - but many thousands of people have done the same thing over the years with many hundreds of other fuel treatments, none of which turned out to actually work. So all this adds up to is yet another scienceless testimonial.

(The other companies that denied connections with Firepower were Caltex/Ampol, BP, General Motors and the Australian military, none of whom are mentioned in the “results”… any more.)

On page 22, someone who glories in the name Calliope Sofianopoulos (and is a translator, by trade) claims that Firepower products significantly improved the fuel consumption and exhaust gas composition of three taxis.

Did she do drive cycle tests to validate the fuel consumption figures? ‘Course not. Why should she? But if she hasn’t, then you shouldn’t use the results as evidence that your product works, because it is not in fact anything of the sort.

On page 23, some organisation called “Labtest Hong Kong” apparently also thought that just driving a car around was an adequate test, which I really must repeat yet again it is not, even if the test is blinded so the driver doesn’t know when you’ve added the supposed fuel enhancer. That did not appear to be the case for this test, which raises some questions in my mind about what kind of “lab” that joint actually is.

Then there’s one from the Philippines on page 29 that has an actual static test of a truck as well as the usual useless driving around, and claims a 16.43% fuel economy improvement - though they for some reason tested it with the engine idling, which doesn’t strike me as very useful. I suppose we’ve got to take what we can get, though.

And on it goes. But who knows what any of these tests, even the better-looking ones, actually are?

I know I’m not going to call Directory Assistance in six countries to try to find the people apparently associated with the higher-quality tests and grill them about what they really did. Firepower should be the ones presenting multiple proper tests from clearly identified and readily contactable authorities. And they shouldn’t be presenting them to me; they should be presenting them to all of those big fuel and car companies with whom they said they had such impressive deals.

If you’ve got a super fuel additive that does the things Firepower’s stuff is supposed to do, and if you’ve got enough money to sponsor sports teams and show off a million-dollar Roller, then obviously you’ve got enough money to get proper tests done by proper, respected, well-known organisations - in Australia, I’d start with the NRMA and the RACV. And then blammo, billions of dollars are yours.

But Firepower are not, of course, going to do that. Because Firepower are just the latest in a very long line of companies making stuff to put in your fuel that… doesn’t really do anything.

They say the exact same things as many of their forebears.

I mean, look at page 5 of the PDF. It says “when the fuel is burned in the combustion chamber not all of the fuel is used and a proportion goes out the exhaust…”.

This is true, and a frequently-heard claim from fuel additive manufacturers. But the actual unburnt fuel fraction for a modern engine is 2%, at the very most.

So there’s almost nothing to be gained there.

Apparently the Firepower products work “by burning more of the heavier elements of your fuel, increasing power and fuel economy”. But this is impossible; if any significant fuel energy were actually left in the exhaust from a normal engine, it would either burn the car’s catalytic converter off in very short order, or cause the car to miserably fail any modern emissions test. Firepower claim fuel economy gains of well over 10%; well over 20%, in some of the testimonials. But the only mechanism they provide by which this can happen can give you only a couple of percentage points, and probably less.

Fuel additive companies always take advantage of people’s vague knowledge that engines are only thirty-something per cent efficient, and use it to make people think that sixty-something per cent of the fuel energy is readily recoverable, because the fuel isn’t burning completely, or fast enough, or in the right pattern, or something.

Engines are actually so inefficient because, although the fuel burns very completely, there are inescapable thermodynamic reasons for lots of the resultant energy to be lost as heat. In brief, unless you make an internal combustion engine that runs a lot hotter, you can’t make one that’s a lot more efficient.

There have, as I said, been many “fuel pill” products before, one of which was, I remind you, actually sold by the same guy who’s the chairman of Firepower now. The case study of the discredited BioPerformance Gas Pill on Tony’s fuel saving gadget site (to which I have been linking rather a lot, lately…) is informative, here; it appears to be very similar to the Firepower pill in composition, claims-made and backing evidence.

If Firepower want people to take them seriously, it seems to me that they should have proper independent tests done on their supposedly miraculous technologies, rather than just touting all of the contracts they’ve supposedly signed with people who haven’t necessarily done any more due diligence than have Firepower themselves.

If Firepower substantiate their claims with proper tests, I’ll be the first to recant my skepticism and sing their praises. And buy the pills, too - though I imagine they’ll be in short supply for a while, what with every motorist on earth being eager to get hold of them.

While Firepower insist on acting like a long line of fuel-pill hucksters selling worthless products, though, I cannot in good conscience treat them any other way. No matter how much they threaten me.

I just received this:

Dear Dan,

You are an idiot.

I suggest before you make claims regarding a product, you complete all
your research correctly. Maybe you should try a product before you talk
about it.

I have attached a summary of our results.

You can remove your defamatory statements regarding our product within the
next 48 hours and post an apology and reference our results or we will
commence legal action immediately.

–
Kind Regards,

Stephen Moss
Chief Executive Officer
Firepower International

Kind regards, indeed!

You can currently see fresh-faced young Stephen on buyfirepowerpill.com, to which firepowerinternational.com redirects. He’s placing “the first Firepower Pill in his 2007 Rolls Royce Phantom LWB”, which only a mean person would suggest he might just have rented for the day.

(And wait a minute - “the first Firepower Pill”? They’ve only now gotten around to making one?)

The press release on the front page of buyfirepowerpill.com also says a study by the University of New South Wales supports their claims about their fuel pills. I presume this is the same one they talked about before when they alluded to one Dr Stephen Hall of that institution, but you will of course still not find the slightest hint anywhere on any Firepower site, or anywhere else I can find for that matter, as to how the supposed study was performed, and what the results were.

What data Firepower have chosen to publish shows, as far as I can see, only that a Firepower pill possibly added slightly more than one per cent to the combustion energy of sixty litres of petrol. And that study’s not, of course, been replicated. Whoopee. They have a long list of other claims, mainly of enormous fuel economy gains in unscientific tests, but the plural of anecdote is not data; even if every one of those testimonials is from by someone who truly and honestly believes it, it’s far too easy to fool yourself if you don’t control the test properly. Literally hundreds of fuel treatment pills, potions and gadgets have come and gone over the decades, all backed by the same sorts of anecdotes and all found to be worthless when - or if - tested properly.

If you’re one bloke in a garage, you can’t be expected to come up with high quality tests. But Firepower have the money to do proper tests - lots of them. And yet, not only do they still rest comfortably on a big old pile of anecdotes (most of which are from hard-to-trace people in places like Oman, Russia and the Philippines), but they have even previously admitted that when they said, for instance, that tests were done “by Volvo”, what they actually meant was they were done on Volvo trucks by… someone.

All this aside, I’d be thinking Firepower would be more interested in suing Fairfax Media, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age, since all of my Firepower-related blog posts simply link to and talk about the series of Herald stories on the company and its many colourful characters and connections.

Firepower do actually say they were indeed taking the Herald to court… in May last year. But nothing seems to have come of that. All of the Herald articles remain up on the Web.

So let’s recap, shall we?

According to the Herald:

Rise of a man with a magic mystery pill (with a sidebar about the not-very-impressive, and not-recently-improved, evidence Firepower provide to support their claims, and the strange similarity of their fuel pill to another one.)

Austrade doles out to secretive firm.

Firepower-AWB inquiry link.

Firepower link to dead dictator and former spy (in which they admit they are “unable to produce some of the promised independent tests that showed its supposedly miracle products extend fuel efficiency.”)

Still waiting for the proof behind the spruik.

Magic pills, religious links, Russian death threats, big sports sponsorships.

Mothball additive in tanks gives fuel for thought.

Firepower boss feeling the heat.

I don’t have to tell any of you what’ll happen if Mr Moss actually follows through with a lawsuit and gets me to stop, um, accurately describing something that I read on other Web pages that’re all still very much up, but clearly Stephen is new to this whole Intarweb thing and needs to have the situation explained to him.

If, Stephen, you’d like about a thousand more blogs to start linking to those Herald articles, go ahead and try to stop me doing it. Because that’s what’ll happen, even if you win a defamation case against me. Which, itself, is far from certain.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of you little monkeys were tapping away at your own blog posts already.

And yes - Stephen did indeed attach the “results” he mentions in his e-mail. I talk about them, in tedious detail, here.

I used the Sydney Morning Herald’s feedback form to ask them what had happened to their adulatory article about the Moletech Fuel Saver. The other day that page had turned into a weird error-within-a-page, but it now gives a proper “your page was not found” error.

The reply, from “Thea & Justine”, reads in full:

The article was removed from our site for legal reasons.

I’ve asked them whether they’d care to elucidate, but I suspect they would not.

I’ve also e-mailed the actual author of the piece. The game’s afoot!

Four days ago (I forgot to post about it until now) I was surprised to actually receive a reply from the Australian Federal Government’s pithily-named Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government about the Moletech (or maybe MTECH) Fuel Saver, an entirely generic-sounding magical fuel treatment device which I blogged about a while ago.

The enthusiastic Sydney Morning Herald piece about the Fuel Saver concluded with a claim that the abovementioned Department Of Having A Very Long Name had published some sort of report on the device, following “a vehicle emissions test report conducted in October last year”.

One Craig Stone from that Department, though, did in fact get back to me, as follows:

Thank you for your query. The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, formerly the Department of Transport and Regional Services (DOTARS), is currently looking into this matter.

At no time has the Department endorsed this product or conducted emission testing on it.

Thanks, Craig!

And isn’t this a turn-up for the books - it seems that some people selling a magic fuel treatment gadget aren’t being entirely straightforward about the validity of their supporting evidence! Say it ain’t so!

Oh, and one more thing: The Herald piece, entertainingly headlined “Fuel Saver No Snake Oil”, was here and here, but isn’t any more. This is odd, because I don’t think the Herald (or their sister paper the Melbourne Age, which has done the same thing with its copy of the article) normally retract Web articles - certainly not with a mere “page not found” error, as is the case here.

There’s no official notice of retraction that I can see, either. The only mention of the Fuel Saver on the Herald’s site right now is in this reprinted AFP piece.

And actually, it gets even weirder. The text of the article as it currently stands, surrounded by all the rest of the normal ads and navigation and so on that surrounds any other article text, now appears to be a standard Internet Explorer “The page cannot be found” 404 error, complete with the bit at the bottom that says

HTTP 404 - File not found
Internet Explorer

That looks pretty bloody odd when you’re viewing the page in Firefox.

It’s not a frame, or anything; it really looks as if someone’s copied and pasted an Internet Explorer 404 page into the Sydney Morning Herald’s content management system as the text for that article.

I wonder if we’re looking at the handiwork of an embarrassed author, here?

A reader, coincidentally also called Dan, just sent me this:

Holy CRAP! How did we miss this amazing revelation?

[I’ll spare you the enormous forwarded e-mail Dan tacked onto his message, but it started with the words “Do You Want To Know RIGHT NOW How You Can Drive Around Using WATER as FUEL and Laugh At Rising Gas Costs, While Reducing Emissions and Preventing Global Warming?”]

P.S. I didn’t even bother to read through the whole thing, my obviously limited knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics, entropy etc. made me feel like I had been purposely misled by my professors to support the great Oil Companies’ conspiracy.

The text you forwarded is from the Easy Water Car site, but it’s been copied all over the Web.

These scams are old, old, old, though they’ve gained new life as oil prices rise.

They always include some bulldust about electrolysis or fuel cells, then usually something about “HHO” gas or “Brown’s Gas” (supposedly a magical special combination of hydrogen and oxygen that can somehow give you more energy than you used cracking water to make it), and then you make some gadget that pumps its tiny gas output into your engine’s fuel input, and it doesn’t do a damn thing, and that’s about it. Unless you decide to tinker with the thing until you die of old age, which seems to be the choice of many people who’re enthusiastic about this stuff.

I’ve written about the “HHO” sorts of scams before, here. There’s a bit more about car-on-water scams, in the similarly ancient “turning water into gasoline” variant, here.

The versions of the scam that try to run the whole car off an electrolysis gadget always fall at the first hurdle, of course. It’s theoretically possible, but you might as well take the tons of electricity needed to make enough gas to run an engine and use it to drive an electric car directly. Anything that can run off a normal car’s alternator will not, duh, run a normal car.

The “hybrid” versions of the scam, though - which, like the Easy Water Car version, claim to use the mystic hydrogen generator to greatly decrease the fuel consumption of a normal car - can run just about as well as an unmodified car, because that’s basically what they are. So there are plenty of options for the creative scammer to make a demo machine that looks as if it’s working. Any slightly experienced race-car mechanic could make a car look as if it’s running on nothing in a hundred ways.

Despite that, many of the scammers put on a very poor show. One of the front-runners, who’s been pulling stuff like this for many years, is Dennis Lee.

A lot of the current “water car” excitement also has to do with the “Joe Cell“, a rich and abundant source of very high-energy pseudoscience.