What Is a Carburetor and Why Does Your Car Need the Part? (2025)

FAQs

What Is a Carburetor and Why Does Your Car Need the Part? ›

Carburetors are used to mix fuel and air together before sending the mix into the engine cylinders for ignition, powering the vehicle. The carburetor sits atop the engine block beneath the air filter, and operates using a combination of vacuum power and cable control.

Carburetors are responsible for mixing air with fuel to obtain the correct ratio for a combustible vehicle's engine. The carburetor also helps to control the engine's speed when the gas pedal is pressed.

Sure. It's called fuel injection. As far as a car with a carburetor, if you removed it and sprayed starter fluid directly into the manifold, (kids, don't try this at home) it would probably start.

Rough Idling: Your engine could idle and become shaky or sputter when you take pressure off the gas pedal. This problem is a common sign that your motor is getting an unsatisfactory air-fuel mixture. Hard Starts: If your vehicle is hesitant to start when the engine is cold, it could be that the air-fuel ratio is wrong.

Classic cars and older vehicles still have them, but that's not the case for modern cars made after the 1990s. Electric vehicles also don't have them, simply because they don't need this engine component to function. Cars don't have carburetors anymore because they can heighten the car's carbon emissions.

The power that an engine makes is controlled by how much air the pistons can pump through in a given time. The venturi in a carburettor restricts this a little and a bigger carburettor will have a bigger venturi that restricts the air less but only by a percent or two.

It isn't impossible to fix a carburetor; it just takes patience, attention to detail, and plenty of research to learn which parts you'll need to replace, how you should clean them, and how they all go back together.

Another recognizable sign of carburetor trouble is rough idling . In other words, if your engine is shaking, sputtering, or otherwise acting up when your vehicle is at a stop, you'll need to bring your vehicle to a repair shop to have the carburetor looked at.

Is a carburetor expensive to fix? ›

Most mechanics charge between $200 and $600 to replace a carburetor, with the majority of that cost going towards labor. The actual cost of the part varies widely, from around $50 for a basic carburetor to over $1000 for a performance-based one.

You can make a mistake when rebuilding the carburetor that leads to extensive damage to your carburetor and vehicle. Ultimately, attempting to do a rebuild without experience can end up costing you more money than a simple carburetor replacement.

Carburetor Maintenance

You should check your carburetor every 15,000 to 20,000 miles or every six months, whichever comes first. External cleaning is quick and easy, allowing you to look for failing hoses, clamps, linkages, or other components. The linkages should move freely and return to the closed position.

In passenger car petrol engines, fuel injection was introduced in the early 1950s and gradually gained prevalence until it had largely replaced carburetors by the early 1990s.

Use carburetor cleaner to remove deposits, clogs & debris

Deposits inside the carburetor can clog fuel and air passages and reduce performance or stop the engine altogether. Luckily, you can take care of many of these problems quickly and easily; often without even removing the carburetor from the engine.

In fact, the carburetor was one of those key advances that made it possible to put an explodey contraption on top of a wheeled cart and semi-reliably travel down the road. But for all things an end must come, and the last carbureted passenger vehicle rolled off an assembly line in 1991.

Modern vehicles have transitioned away from “carbs” (which, in this case, is slang that does not refer to bread or grain products) in favor of fuel injection systems, which have a lot of advantages over carburetors: They don't require warming up, they're more efficient and more reliable.

Because a fuel injection system can more precisely control the air to fuel ratio, it results in a more efficient use of fuel, reduced fuel consumption, and lower emissions. The electronic system can constantly tweak the balance depending on the engine's needs, resulting in less wasted energy and better fuel efficiency.

Since the 1990s, carburetors have been largely replaced by fuel injection for cars and trucks, but carburetors are still used by some small engines (e.g. lawnmowers, generators, and concrete mixers) and motorcycles. In addition, they are still widely used on piston engine driven aircraft.

Rough idling or stalling: Dirty carburetors can cause erratic engine behavior at idle or when decelerating. Difficulty starting: A clogged carburetor can impede fuel flow, making it challenging to start the engine.