Carburetor or Electric Fuel Injection? What is Better?

At race tracks, garages, and water coolers around the globe, there’s always that debate of what is better: fuel injection or a carbureted setup for your particular application. Each side will have their reasoning whether it be efficiency, cost, or some mix of both, and when each side really gets into the argument, there’s no calling off the dogs! These guys are going to spit out their evidence for their side of the debate until they’re blue in the face and odds are that neither of them will admit that they’re wrong at the end of the discussion!

This time, we take a ride along with an experiment that has Motor Trend putting that exact question to the test to settle the battle once and for all, or at least try to. Maybe one day, we’ll all be on the same page about the issue and this video is one step toward stacking up information that leads us to an answer.

The motor in question is none other than a good old 5.3L GM LS, much like the ones you’d see pulled out of General Motors pickup trucks from the late 90s and early 2000s and stuffed into, well, everything that you could possibly imagine. Seriously, everything from airplanes to racecars and everything in between has been seen wielding engines of the like.

How will the test mule stand up to each kind of fueling? Well, check out the video below that takes a Holley double-pumper carb and puts it against their self-learning electronic fuel injection system to find out. When it gets down to the brass tax, which one of these setups will reign supreme? Does evidence like the one in this video sway you one way or another to make a decision on how your fuel will be delivered?