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I found a maker of spark plugs that claims that their spark plug can increase fuel economy by 2 to 13% depending on the car. The company is Enerpulse.

They have created a new kind of spark plug that create sparks that are 10 times stronger than regular spark plugs. The way it works is that they use a capacitor to accumulate current before the spark, much like a flash on a camera, and then when the spark fires, it is a lot stronger. This means a more thorough combustion with less unburned fuel. On top of that, they claim that you get more horsepower and more torque at the same time.

This is an excerpt of what they mention on their website:

This new technology is a drop-in replacement for all spark plugs, including those iridium, high performance spark plugs. Pulstar is designed to more efficiently ignite the fuel in an engine's cylinders increasing fuel economy, horsepower and torque. Pulstar™ pulse plugs look and fit like spark plugs, but incorporate an internal capacitor to deliver a spark 10 times more powerful than a spark plug with less cycle-to-cycle variation.

One of my friends is an electrical engineer and when I told him about this company's spark plug, he told me that one concern he had was that their plug could change the timing of the car since the spark plug accumulate current before firing and may then fire a little bit later than with regular spark plugs.

I sent an email to Enerpulse to ask them about that:

A colleague of mind, who is an electrical enginering, mentions that the capacitor your put in your plug might delay the time at which the plug sparks and thus alter the timing of the engine. As you mention in your site, a regular spark plug heats up a little bit for 5 millionth of a second before sparking. With your capacitor plug, how long does it accumulate the charge before sparking? If it is longer than the time it takes a regular plug before it sparks, then that could potentially make your plug spark later in the process when the piston has already started his descent.

Their answer was:

Your EE friend would be right if the capacitor were wired in series to the HV circuit but it is in parallel so the time it takes for the capacitor to charge is contemporaneous with the ionization period so timing and total spark event duration is unchanged.

Sound fair enough. When I decide to change the spark plugs on my car, I will let you know. Also if anyone has any real world experience with Enerpulse's plugs please email me and I'll post your results on this blog.

Thanks