Originally Posted by Ed32

Why is so hard to read the manual? I read it before I bought the car, there are on line versions in case you are allergic to paper

Originally Posted by JoesC5

I agree with your post but I'm betting door #2 is where most gas stations get their gas. Not many cities have their own dedicated oil refinery for each brand. If your city has a refinery, chance are most, if not all, brands in that city get their gas from that refinery.

Locally, we have a large storage terminal in Brookline, MO, that supplies not only Springfield, but a huge portion of southwest Missouri, and parts of Arkansas. Unless a station has a special gas (like the two Phillips stations that have ethanol free 94 octane premium) I doubt if the remaining stations are trucking in gas from Bartlesville, OK or Ponca City, OK or Derby, KS, when they can truck it from a storage terminal on the outskirts of Springfield that is supplied by a pipeline.

Originally Posted by LDB

I do not know the Springfield situation, but the point of option #3 is that even in the situation you describe, if Springfield is on a pipeline to a refining center like Houston, they could run a slug of Shell into one of your terminal’s tanks, a slug of Exxon into another, a slug of BP into yet another, and so forth. So your single terminal could have multiple, segregated brands within its boundaries, just like it for sure has multiple, segregated octane grades within its boundaries. Just because your area has only one terminal, it does not guarantee you are in option #2. You could still be #2 or #3.

Originally Posted by JoesC5

That could be the case, but there is no way the consumer has of knowing that the Conoco gas the consumer purchased came from a Conoco refinery, or the Exxon gas came from an Exxon refinery. I have never seen any brand guarantee that the gas you buy from one of it's retailers 100% came from one of it's refineries.