With my previous LS's I ran regular unleaded (87 octane) and it ran fine for daily driving. If you have the owners manual it will tell you what grade of fuel to put in. But IIRC it says that regular is fine.
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I think the V6 has a knock sensor - if so it might advance the timing to take advantage of the premium fuel. If the timing advances, then it could very well get better mpg and should make more power.
I'm on my first tank (got the car EMPTY - I was surprised it made it to the gas station lol) and I started with regular, 'cause I'm cheap, lol - I'm really hot rodding it and so far, no pinging that I can detect (tho' I'm not so good at the high sounds anymore lol
) - my next tank will be a full batch of Chevron Premium. My mpg won't really reflect normal driving -like I said, it's new to me, and I'm having fun but eventually I'll do a few tanks of each, in a row, and determine if there is any improvement w/premium.As for a general rule, for MOST cars, I'd say premium does NOT help, just costs more money to no benifit. It's less explosive, harder to detonate, than regular - in winter, it tends to misfire more in extreme cold start up. In normal driving, unless the motor conditions lead to detonation/knock and require premium, it shouldn't help or improve running at all. Premium requirement is mostly a function of compression ratio, not 4 valve combustion chamber design. Lots of high performance, 4 valve engines have high compression I'm sure, and do require high octane - so I can see it being associated with 4 valve engines a lot. My 1979 Honda CB750F had 4 valve heads, and a 9500 rpm redline, but did run on regular.
For my background, I was a Ford tech from 92 to 97. I had training on the Probe/Mazda, but didn't work on even one - mostly because in Alaska, it's 90% SUV/Trucks. I might still have a Ford CD with some Probe manuals in it, I should check
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