Drivers Sputter as Leaded Gas Phaseout Nears

A state rule requiring gasoline refiners to get the lead out by Jan. 1 has Timothy Hall doing a slow burn.

Hall, 46, an Eagle Rock schoolteacher, owns two 1960s-era Corvairs, which he keeps mainly because they’re easy to work on. “There’s a generator and a carburetor and six cylinders; you don’t have all that garbage on the engine,” Hall explained. “It’s simple, and I can fix it.”

But the aging vehicles run on leaded regular gas. Come New Year’s Day, Hall and the other owners of 1.6 million older vehicles in California--poor and elderly drivers, as well as collectors of antique cars--won’t be able to find a drop in the state. That’s when the California Air Resources Board has decreed that all service stations sell only unleaded grades.

Both the ARB and the oil companies, in an effort to reassure such motorists, argue that unleaded gasoline will work just fine in their older cars, classic or clunker.

But Hall doesn’t buy it.

“No. I don’t believe that,” he said as he gassed up at a neighborhood station. “The engine, the whole design, was designed around leaded gas. To say something else will work is a pretty simplistic solution. It might work, it might drive you down the street, but . . . what kind of gas mileage would you get? What’s it going to cost to retune? And will there be retuning at shorter intervals?”

In addition, he asked, “It reduces the value of my vehicle, doesn’t it? If everybody knows that there’s no gas for it, I can’t really sell it.”

Independent experts differ on whether unleaded gasoline will harm older cars. But all agree with oil companies that owners of older cars won’t be able to change from 88-octane leaded regular gasoline to 87-octane regular unleaded gasoline without some knocks and pings.

To ensure smooth driving, motorists will have to buy higher octane mid-grade or premium unleaded gasoline, which this week costs from 13 to 21 cents a gallon more than leaded regular, according to a national survey of pump prices by the American Automobile Assn.

Basil Gaynor, 47, said he’ll have to switch to higher-priced premium unleaded to fuel his old Chevy pickup, which the Torrance man uses to haul relief supplies to Native American groups in Arizona and Nevada.

The financial effect will not be major, but he added: “It’s just interesting that they don’t tell us these things.”

Driver complaints notwithstanding, air quality officials say the elimination of lead from the state’s fuel supply will mark a victory over pollution.

“This is the culmination of a dozen years of work to get lead out of gasoline because of the health threat that airborne lead poses,” said ARB spokesman Bill Sessa in Sacramento. “It’s been linked to anemia in adults, to neurological damage that causes learning disorders in children.”

In the late 1970s, added Sessa, “the peak lead levels in the air were 10 times higher than our health standards . . . and the worst levels were in Southern California.”

Both the state and the federal governments have been phasing out lead in gasoline since then. In California, lead levels have fallen from as high as 3.5 grams per gallon in the 1960s to the current 0.1 gram per gallon. (It was in September, 1990, that the ARB voted to bar all lead, effective Jan. 1.)

As a result, Sessa said, “We have not violated (lead) health standards anywhere in the state for the last seven or eight years, and that’s a public health benefit.”

Recently, in anticipation of the phaseout, the amount of lead in regular gasoline sold in the state has fallen to virtually nothing.

“We regularly test gasoline from refineries to enforce all the specs we adopt, and we have not found any gasoline with more than a trace of lead in it for the last six months,” Sessa said.

At the same time, demand for leaded gasoline has been falling as the vehicle fleet becomes newer. Only about 7% of the state’s vehicles are the pre-1975 cars and other vehicles that use leaded fuel; leaded gas sales in California account for less than 10% of some oil companies’ total sales.

Aside from an announcement when the rule was adopted, the ARB has put out virtually no publicity on the lead phaseout, said board spokesman Jerry Martin.

“There’s probably been more interest than we thought there would be, but the phase-down has been going on for the last 10 years, and we’re just removing the last traces of it,” he said. “We didn’t consider it to be that important.”

Some refiners long ago abandoned lead. Unocal Corp. stopped selling leaded gasoline in California in 1986 and now markets three grades of unleaded.

In 1989, Atlantic Richfield Co. replaced its leaded regular grades with cleaner-burning EC-1 unleaded in its Southern California stations. This month, the company did the same at its Las Vegas stations.

Now, all refiners will have to.

Some are making a big deal about it. Chevron Corp. announced last week that it will replace its leaded grades with a new, mid-grade unleaded at its 1,600 California service stations by the end of the month. The new grade will wholesale for about 5 cents a gallon more than the old leaded regular.

Others, such as Mobil Corp., are also replacing leaded grades with a new mid-grade unleaded, but not saying much about it.

Still others--Arco stations outside Southern California, for instance--are getting rid of leaded gas but not replacing it with anything, leaving only regular unleaded and premium unleaded.

As the changeover takes place, such service station operators as Sheik Ramessar, a Chevron dealer in Highland Park, find themselves on the firing line. “They’re worried,” he said of motorists. “They’re concerned that they need more lead for their engines.”

Joe Ortega, 61, a retiree from Pasadena, accepts the news with resignation. He has owned his ’66 Lincoln for about 20 years, and by now the aircraft-carrier-like auto rumbles like a freight train.

But he’ll continue driving it, higher cost or not, he said. It does not make any difference, he said, “you have to run your car, or you get a bicycle.”

Both the ARB and the oil companies say that, except in cases of the heaviest use, the new unleaded grades will work just fine in old cars.

“In spite of the popular misperception, motorists who buy leaded gasoline have always been able to use either leaded or unleaded fuel,” said Don Beers, Chevron product quality consultant.

That view is echoed by Owen Smith, a UCLA professor of chemical engineering, who adds that older cars may even run better on unleaded fuel because it burns cleaner.

Similarly, owners of chain saws, lawn mowers and leaf blowers need not worry about lack of leaded gasoline, manufacturers insist.

“Lead-free gasoline would be the best from the standpoint of burning cleaner and more efficiently and leaving less residue in the engine itself,” said George Thompson, a spokesman for Briggs & Stratton Corp. in Milwaukee. The company says it is the world’s largest maker of 2- to 18-horsepower gasoline engines for snow blowers, generators and other equipment. Even older motors will run perfectly fine on unleaded gas, he added.

But such reassurances are dismissed by other experts.

John Bobb, a former aerospace engineer who now coordinates an automotive technology program at California State University at Long Beach, says that cars built before the mid-1970s--particularly American models with cast-iron cylinder heads--could suffer damage to exhaust valves without leaded gasoline.

Such damage could appear within 10,000 to 30,000 miles, and result in $600 to $1,000 in repairs, he said. Only the use of lead additives or so-called “valve-saver” chemicals to the tank could prevent such damage, according to Bobb. But that could add $4 to the cost of a 10-gallon fill-up.

Ed Cholakian, a Sylmar businessman and entrepreneur who collects antique cars, fumes at the pledges offered by refiners. “I don’t believe it,” said Cholakian, who collects the gas-guzzling Cadillac behemoths of the 1940s and ‘50s.

At last count, he had about 170--and they all run on leaded regular. As for unleaded gasoline, he said: “It’s just not as good, period.”

For his part, Chevron dealer Ramessar said he’s glad to be rid of leaded gas.

“There were a few customers who were cheating before and putting the (cheaper) leaded fuel into their vehicles that they weren’t supposed to,” he explained. “And if there were an inspector here and saw that, it would be our responsibility.”

Come Jan. 1, said Ramessar, “I don’t have to worry about that.”