Sometime back when I did the comparison between additives and Vsafe products, little did I expect the massive response Vsafe would get from my write-up and quite a lot of ZTH folks actually went ahead and tried the product.
I started receiving PMs and comments regarding the product (for some reason the comments have all been purged?) some good and some bad. I fed everything back to the good folks back at Vsafe and they informed me that they were long already in the process with coming up with a new formula and new packaging. All the feedback given to them only meant more product tweaking (I would assume).
A few short weeks later, a new packaging and formula was given to me for a trial run.
Now, as much as I’d like to give this new formula a complete run over with a dyno run and all, I’m just an average Joe who has to pay for all of these tests and I’m not really a part of the ZTH editorial team so these tests aren’t subsidized by ZTH. But that only makes the test a little more unbiased IMHO. This round however I just didn’t have the time since I was travelling quite a bit for my regular job (hey… something has to pay the bills). So the only test I could do was to let the car decide whether or not it liked the formula.
Allow me to explain. My (now sold) Wira was a picky sonnuvabitch. Give her a little more potent jungle juice and she’ll happily kick you in the ass in appreciation. Give her anything less and she’ll knock/ping at lower revs and high revs. What is knocking? The hesitation in the engine to respond to your throttle commands and in the high-rev range, it usually meant impending engine doom (failure) if the knocking was allowed to continue. Since she was already fueled up with RON95 + the old VSafe additive, I drove it until she had to be refueled and used the new formula + RON95 instead.
Why is this significant? Because my Wira was already knock-free with the previous formula. If the new formula caused any knocking then the formula is rubbish. If she didn’t knock then the formula works. If she ran smoother or/and gave me better fuel mileage, then the formula works really well. But I’d be unable to verify if there were any power gains since no dyno was done. Unfortunately the first test sample made her knock like crazy. Bad. Fed back to Vsafe and shortly after they provided me with another batch of their improved formula.
I need to explain one other thing – modern cars these days have adaptive ECUs. They adapt to the fuel and air being fed in and adjust the ignition timing accordingly. My Wira uses the infamous Siemens ECU which is notoriously known to be a pain to mod and tune. Personally I never had issues modding my Wira because the Siemens ECU was actually smart enough to adapt to the mods I introduced to it and fully utilized it. I could write an entire article on what mods can be applied to the Siemens ECU car, but that’s another story for another day. All this meant my Wira will self adapt to the quality of the petrol I feed her and that applies to most modern cars.
However
Some cars need their ECUs reset to re-adapt to any changes to the car. On my other car – a Nissan Sylphy, I tested the new Vsafe formula and it did absolutely nothing for my Sylphy. I reset the ECU with the following petrol refill (with additive), suddenly I had 30km more mileage at the end of that tank. Repeated the test again and hey presto 30km more! Not much but that’s plenty! On my Wira, she stopped knocking and worked really well. Interestingly enough though, swapping back to the original additive resulted in the engine knocking again which was really strange! It meant the Wira was able to run on a more aggressive ignition timing with the new working formula.
The new packaging is now one fill one bottle too. So it’s smaller and easier to pour in. The earlier issue with the vapor escaping the bottle and stinking up my entire store room was rectified in this new, much cooler looking black bottle. The good folks at Vsafe are re-offering the discount provided earlier :
1. Link : http://vsafeenergy.com/petrol.jsp
2. Create an account and sign up.
3. Look for the product you want to buy and add it your shopping cart.
4. Key in the voucher code : ONLINE1000 in the shopping cart checkout. Hey presto, 10% discount!
I understand that Groupon is currently offering this product for 20% so if you’re on Groupon, it’ll be cheaper there for a short period of time!
I’m a Malaysian and am a proud one too. I’m just not happy with the management. Country wise we have great people, excellent traditions and I have solid relationships with friends of different races. So it’s pretty awesome to see Vsafe, a Malaysian company selling their products that work (for me anyway) and responding positively to feedback from its customers. I hear they are quite big in parts of China too. Malaysia boleh!
