NOTE: This thread concerns the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; not internal combustion engines.
Doesn’t have to be a big hole in the sidewall, you can’t put a plug in it no matter the size so a needle can render a tire FUBAR
What would exactly happen if one woule pour sugar in the gas tank? Like on a chemical and mechanical level?
First time hearing about this
We call table salt “salt” even though that’s a generic name for any metal bonded with a non metallic mineral (for instance potassium chloride). Sugar is the same, table sugar is just one kind of sugar. “Sugar” is the generic name for a type of carbohydrate. Ethanols found in gasoline can degrade into a sugar over time (like in a mower left out over the winter) and this will leave a fine white powder in the engine that will cause scaring when the engine is started. Thus sugar can ruin your engine, but is more likely to increase wear. This has perpetuated an urban legend that you can force this by putting table sugar in a gas tank.
I realize (and you mentioned) that sugar is not a well defined term, but calling degradation products of ethanol in gas "sugars" is still a bit of a stretch. Ethanol by itself usually forms some combination of acetaldehyde, acetic acid, 2-carbon peroxides, and CO2 (i.e. not sugars) upon autoxidation, though those species can react with other components of gasoline to form the precipitated "gum". The structure of gum in the literature is pretty hand-wavy (high MW materials kinda just be like that sometimes) but tends to be much more more oxygen-defficient than conventional "sugars" (polysacchatides) even for ethanol blends and contains a wider variety of substructures. Though, I have seen some papers talking about certain microbes that can ferment the ethanol in gasoline, possibly via sugars, but I don't think that's the common degradarion pathway for a mower.
~~Oh, it just gums everything up. The fuel doesn't combust as well, and the pistons get sticky, among other things.~~
EDIT: I was wrong. It clogs the fuel filter, the same way sand would.
This is, at best, a myth. Sugar doesn’t dissolve in gasoline. There may be trace amounts of water in the tank too, but not enough to dissolve a meaningful amount of sugar. All it will realistically do is clog their fuel filter, the same way sand would.
What about if you poured a considerable amount of syrup in there instead?
I'm assuming this syrup is a thick aqueous solution of sugar, in which case it would settle on the bottom of the fuel tank without mixing with the gasoline. If it did get into the engine, it would likely clog the injector or carburetor, but it would likely just cause the engine to stall from fuel starvation, or blow the fuel pump's fuse.
Maybe that's the idea, then. My apologies.
Gasoline can be up to 10% ethanol now. Does sugar dissolve into that?
no
Okay, won't do that 🫡
Why only ICE vehicles? EVs might be marginally better, but cars are still cars, and they kill hundreds of people every year, cost billions of dollars in direct infrastructure costs (in the huge subsidies that roads get), and untold amounts more in indirect infrastructure costs (because of how inefficient low-density car-centric sprawl is wrt things like sewerage and other municipal infrastructure). Over about 20 km/h the noise pollution is roughly equally bad, and the plastic pollution from tyres is just as bad if not worse on EVs.
What's needed isn't to push people from ICE vehicles onto EVs, it's to encourage people to use (and more importantly, governments to support) active transport like walking and cycling first and foremost, with public transport for longer journeys.
I'm also not a big fan of that sort of indiscriminate vandalism anyway. I'm not gonna bat an eye if you're doing it to all yank tanks, but people's sedans and hatchbacks? That's a bit much, IMO.
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