Audi And VW Are Getting In On Porsche's Synthetic Fuel Action

Porsche Published Nov 8, 2026, 12:00 PM EST Evan Williams is an automotive journalist and mechanical engineering technologist with more than a decade of experience in the industry. He has written for the Toronto Star and AutoTrader Canada and previously served as editor of Wheelscene.ca .

A four-time Canadian Automotive Journalism Award winner, he is the current President of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada, where he oversees the Canadian Car of the Year Awards program. At CarBuzz for the last year, Evan uses his engineering background to analyze vehicle tech and patents, with a focus on the details that defines great cars.

Sign in to your CarBuzz account Porsche has been working on synthetic fuels for years now, and all of a sudden it's not alone. CarBuzz has just uncovered a new patent from Audi and Volkswagen that shows they, too, are doing engineering research to be ready for the challenges of efuels.

But this invention doesn't go under the hood, it happens before the fuel even enters the vehicle. Fake Gas, Real Results Synthetic fuel is a gasoline substitute that's made without crude oil. It can come from biofuel sources, from natural gas, or by using CO2 and hydrogen along with green-generated electricity.

One of the problems with the fuels, aside from the energy required to produce them, is that they're not always a perfect match for conventional unleaded. As the automotive duo says in the patent, sometimes these fuels don't quite meet standards. In particular, they might not have the right octane number to burn like the regular or premium the vehicle needs.

While an ECU can do a lot to compensate for lower than expected octane , it's not an ideal fix. The two automakers are looking to get the product right before it goes in your tank, and that's where this comes in. The patent describes a machine that would be able to identify fuels in two different tanks or hoses.

It could use values and data that come from the production of each fuel, or it could be integrated with a machine that would analyze each one. From there, another computer would calculate how it needed to blend the two fuels to make an end product that met the specs. A 50-50 blend might be fine, or a particularly low-octane batch might need more conventional fuel instead of efuel.

The patent also describes a third part of the machine that could blend in additives like alcohol or paraffin to get the right end result. How Could The System Be Sure Of The Result? Ricky Esquivel / Pexels This would let Audi and VW make sure whatever was in the tank was exactly the right fuel for the vehicle.

Audi also claims it could adjust the blends to exploit the carbon advantages of each as needed. It would be able to test the end result. The tests would show information important to gasoline experts, like a boiling profile, octane, yield-soot index, and other things you'll need a petroleum engineering degree to care about.

The idea isn't just for gasoline. Audi's patent describes it working with diesel and biodiesel and even with synthetic aviation fuels. The claim is that this method would deliver fuel blends that have better combustion and lower pollutant emissions including particulates as well as carbon.

It's strange to see an automaker inventing something that should exist at refineries or gas stations, but that's not stopping Audi or VW's engineers. If you want something done, sometimes you have to do it yourself. And that includes making the right fuel to clean up your car without going electric.

CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters: Via: Porsche Making synthetic fuels to replace gasoline is still an incredibly resource-intensive process, mostly limited to test-scale volumes. Think drums, not tankers. But Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini have all lobbied to allow it in the EU instead of EVs.

Porsche has put the most research into it, but it is getting a little help from its friends. Patent filings do not guarantee the use of such technology in future vehicles and are often used exclusively as a means of protecting intellectual property. Such a filing cannot be construed as confirmation of production intent.

Source: DPMA