Any high compression DI engine should benefit from higher octane - regardless of the system. I am trying to get my parents to run 91 in their Focuscape just to show them the better mileage.
Originally Posted By: Lurgi
I give my GDI Accent regular Italian tune-ups. They don't seem to "blow out" or "clean out" anything. The [censored] thing continued to ping no matter what. I religiously ran only top tier gas since it was new. I used 87 octane only as well, since the owner's manual states that is OK. Finally, since the pinging was slowly worsening, I decided to try premium fuel only. The ping has almost completely stopped. And the fuel economy has picked up over 5 MPG! on the highway. Using premium is actually quite a bit cheaper with this sort of improvement in economy. And the engine isn't beating itself to death. I would say when it was pinging bad on 87 octane, the knock sensor influenced the computer to take out timing, and I noticed downshifting, apparently to stop the pinging.
Is your car knocking or is it pinging? Are you running premium fuel currently?
The only worry I have is that eventually my car will have carbon build up so bad that it won't even operate on premium any more.
It may not be that. My 2001 Taurus pinged horribly, for years. Dropped a lot of money on it - always thought it was carboned up.
It was just a bad EGR sensor. Finally set a code at 70K miles (had problems from 30K), replaced the DFPE sensor and it never pinged again!