How Many Gallons of Water Will a BMW Engine Make it Through? (For Science!)

When I heard about this one, I have to admit it I kind of thought it was a little bit of a troll job. At the end of the day, combustion engine enthusiasts know that the last thing that you want to happen is for water to go where the air is supposed to go. However, I have to admit that I looked overlooked the plot twist of water injection and how that can change things up a bit.

With water injection, essentially either water or another liquid is injected into the airstream in order to keep things a little bit cooler than they normally would be. However, to my defense, when somebody brings this up, the first thing that comes to one’s head isn’t pouring entire gallons of water into the engine to see if you can clean the carbon deposits off of the pistons a little bit. Well, at least this isn’t what comes to mind when I think of water injection.

However, for a YouTube creator who goes by the name of LegitStreetCars, this was precisely his thought and with the help of a BMW, he would head out to try to see if he could actually clean off the inside of an engine with the help of a couple of gallon jugs of water.

Now, in the back of my head, all that I can think about is how many gallons of water are going to end up in this engine before this poor Bimmer develops a rod knock. However, upon watching the video, I was actually pleasantly surprised as the water began to make its way into the intake manifold and there was absolutely no issue to speak of. In fact, the only byproduct that would alert us to the idea that water was heading into the intake was the nice vaporization of the water as it headed out of the tailpipe.

Down in the video below, with a look inside of the engine, we get to see just how viable the concept of using water to clean out an engine really is.