Has anyone tried these? The G35 is my cousin's car and I've inherited him and the car. She's running well and I want to keep it that way. He is not a stereotypical male teenage driver so the only time the car is driven aggressively is when he says something is wrong an I drive her. I think she runs well. Just recently replace a coil on Cylinder 4 and she seems to be find. I haven't pulled all the plugs and I don't know when they were last replaced. Was thinking of going ahead and replace all 6 with the Ruthenium.

Any thoughts or experience with them?

Patrick aka BubbaPat

 

Just stick with the OEM plugs, DE engines the plugs are good for 75k, HR engines are good for a little more than that. You won't gain anything by switching to a more expensive plug.

 

Yep. When I bought my G back in 2003 I thought it was interesting that factory interval for the plugs was 105k miles.

 

I know a little but about using this one Ruthenium Spark Plugs. This one offers better performance in terms of ignitibility. This can be used for improved quality of air and fuel mixture based combustion.

 

Yeah but for a stock application you'll literally see no change, no gain whatsoever.

Except your wallet will be a little lighter.

Most of these ignition "upgrades" are completely non-applicable to modern day vehicles, it WAS applicable to the distributor-era as well as some early fuel injection systems before the high energy coil pack was introduced.

For example, they sell an even higher output coil pack for the VQ engines, there's no change whatsoever compared to stock though. They are only needed for boosted applications because you can run SLIGHTLY more gap than you would normally. There's a pretty big difference between running .020 and .025 gap, boosted applications you won't have to reduce gap quite as much with a higher energy coil pack.

Spark plugs are a slightly different monster, basically the two characteristics that matter is heat range and durability. The act of creating an arc is literally using up material from the spark plug electrode, a harder material will last longer. A plug that can run hotter will clean itself better.

It's a balancing act for the heat range, you want it hot enough to clean off impurities from the surface but not so hot that you are damaging the material. Some materials handle the heat better due to their higher melting point so they can run a little cleaner overall.

For stock applications "Performance" is a selling point that's basically just lying to the customer, if you read the fine print on their claims it's things like "Iridium plugs provide a substantial performance gain over platinum plugs after 90k miles driven" and ridiculous **** like that. They're saying "it has better performance if you ignore the maintenance schedule on your other spark plugs". Which is TECHNICALLY true, but it's still just lying to the customer because people think that if you take three new spark plugs, one platinum, one iridium, one ruthenium, that one of them is going to perform better than the others in a brand new comparison. Sometimes these tests will involve very highly tuned vehicles like a GT500 or Z06 or something. In those applications it can make a difference but even those cars are usually just running a platinum or iridium plug due to the longevity.

For example, I did a quick trip to the NGK ruthenium plug website and they have this fancy picture that visually shows the combustion differences between ruthenium, iridium, and nickel. In that picture the ruthenium looks FAR superior to the other two however read the fine print, it's the time of ignition and 3 miliseconds later. Who the F cares if a spark plug outperforms another spark plug in that range, that's 0.003 of one second. WHOA! That's some big performance gains! Heck the engine isn't even running at max rpm yet lol.

Their claim that it will drop 0.7 seconds off your 0-60mph time is a flat out LIE. Notice how they provide no details whatsoever about their testing methods? They probably compared a brand new ruthenium plug to an iridium plug with 100k miles on it. No joke that's probably what the comparison was because THAT is HOW they lie to you.

In HIGH performance applications like boosted and nitrous applications there ARE some differences though, especially once you start getting into the 800whp+ range. COPPER is the most conductive material and will outperform any of the other three spark plug alloys, this is why you see all the big power guys running a high heat range copper plug.

Spoiler alert, for the stock VQ engines it won't matter. We have a very high energy coil pack, any of those three plugs will give literally the same fuel economy and dyno results, the only differences that you'll find are this.

-Iridium lasts the longest, can run the hottest, costs the most money.

-Platinum is cheaper than iridium, lasts a respectably long time.

-Ruthenium is sort of in the middle for longevity, costs slightly less than iridium, doesn't have very much actual data on them since they only started becoming popular like 3-4 years ago.

There's also some really good conspiracies behind the ruthenium plugs. For example the metal itself is actually the CHEAPEST of the 3 (platinum, iridium, ruthenium) however they're charging almost the same amount of money as the top tier iridium plugs... and there haven't really been any significant improvements to spark plugs since the iridium plugs became popular about 15 years ago so it's highly suspect that the spark plug manufacturers have started introducing a new type of plug, with some outlandishly bold claims, that costs THEM significantly less to make, yet they want to charge US almost as much as a top tier spark plug. Greedy corporate schemes is a thing after all.

Also, as far as I'm aware there are literally ZERO OEM applications for those plugs, that tells a lot. The engineers are still putting iridium plugs into everything because they are to date the best STOCK application plug there is with the highest maintenance interval.

Ok I'm done ranting.

 

Thanks for chiming in here cleric670. Great info to cut through the marketing haze.

 

Moderator EDIT: Banned for casino botting

 

Thanks. From what I was reading... the main benefit I see to a 200K+ plus car is helping to clean the cylinders. Any other "performance" increase I find skeptical. I just want to keep her running for another 2 years till he graduates college and yet I want to make sure she's dependable to drive anywhere anytime.
I don't think this car has been maintained as well as it was lead to believe. She's had Regular low grade gas run in her for the past 2 years at least. I've been adding Injector Cleaner to the fuel every now and then to help keep it clean.
When she gets down to 1/4 or below on a tank, she starts to idling rough. My only thought at this point is to clean the gas tank or replace it. Not an option I want to do.
I was hoping find anyone whose used them and saw ANY improvement.

 

NGK iridiums all the way. Just don't buy them from ebay or amazon they could be fakes

 

It might actually be EMPTY on fuel at 1/4 tank and thus causing it to seemingly run rough. The gas gauges on these vehicles are notorious for giving a wrong reading. Track the miles driven per tank on the odometer, you should be getting about 15mpg city and 20mpg highway.

I would NEVER trust the gas gauge on a G35 lol.