Every car has to have some way to deliver the fuel to the combustion chamber so it can make the car move. The science of fuel delivery has been around since the first internal combustion engine. The technology has been changing for roughly 50 years because of environmental issues and push for performance and efficiency increases.

The first type of fuel delivery system was the carburetor. They come in many different shaped and sizes but the all do the same basic thing. Use the vacuum of the engine sucking air in to mix the fuel in with the incoming fresh air. There are a couple reasons that carburetors can be bad. They are inefficient because the carb has a fixed mixture or in other words one set of atmospheric variables (temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure) that the carb is optimized for. This means that the carb is often unreliable and cumbersome. Good thing that we don’t use them in cars anymore.

Fuel injection for production cars started in the early sixties. It allowed cars to get better fuel economy and lower emissions but best of all higher specific output or more power for the size of the engine. The most popular form of fuel injection is EFI or electronic fuel injection. This uses a computer to measure atmospheric variables and calculates the best mixture and then calculates how much fuel the injectors need to dispense. Injectors are like a electrical version of a hose nozzle and they are very precise. They spray the fuel at high pressure to make a fine mist that allows for much more complete burning. making the engine more efficient. When you have control over exactly how much fuel goes into each cylinder you can reprogram  the amounts and mixtures. That would be called changing the “fuel map”.

So as we can see the EFI system is far superior than the carburetor for nearly every application. EFI is more environmentally friendly and will make more power out of the same size engine. I’m very exited to see how the new technologies progress.

sources:  https://www.holley.com/

http://www.edelbrock.com/automotive/mc/carburetors/