For a spark to happen 1500 times a minute, everything needs to be timed down to the fraction of a second. This is why the precision timing of your engine is so crucial. To use a common example, if you have a 4-stroke engine that's operating at 3000 RPMs you're going to be having 1500 sparks every minute in the engine. However, in your engine this happens blindingly fast. The power goes from the coil through the electrode and then creates a spark in the gap. When you read it in text like this it seems like a very slow process. When spark plugs work, they do so extremely fast. As you know however a metal like platinum is much more expensive than one like copper These are great conductors of electricity and they can also resist corrosion and heat damage for a long time as well. There are all higher-end spark plugs that you can buy that are made of rarer and precious metals like iridium or platinum.

When you expose copper to high temperatures it will melt which is why most of the copper is coated with a much stronger metal like nickel in order to make it durable. It's remarkably good at conducting electricity but it is not very resilient. Copper is remarkably good at this, which is why most household wiring is made out of copper. Most spark plugs are made from a copper core so that they can efficiently conduct electricity. Anytime someone that refers to the gap in their spark plug, that small space is what they're referring to. If you could watch the reaction as it happens you would see a tiny arc of electricity go between the tip of the spark plug and the tiny electrode that hangs over the top of it. The electricity comes from the ignition coil and creates that tiny spark in the gap to ignite the aerosolized fuel and air mixture. This allows the fuel and air mixture to ignite creating the explosion that is the combustion reaction that causes your engine to function. When the actual spark occurs, the temperature gets up to 60,000 Kelvin. Some spark plugs will get as high as 45,000 volts. There is a tiny gap at the top in which the spark reaction occurs between two electrodes.Īlthough it depends on the individual spark plug, they usually operate on a voltage of 12,000 to 25,000 volts. you screw the shell into the cylinder head which grounds it and the electrode sticks out through the insulator into the combustion chamber. The electrode inside connects to the output terminal of your ignition coil. In the simplest terms a spark plug is an electrode with a ceramic insulator and a metal shell. But every other standard combustion engine, including those in hybrid vehicles, uses spark plugs to ignite the fuel and air mixture in the combustion chamber so that the combustion reaction can occur, and the engine can actually perform its function. Likewise, diesel engines don't use spark plugs the same way that your gasoline power engine will. Obviously electric vehicles work much differently than traditional gas-powered automobiles and as such they don't require a spark plug because there is no fuel to ignite. It's worth noting off the bat but not every vehicle actually even uses spark plugs.

Always get a cost breakdown for a repair job, so you can make sure that you're not overpaying for a part that should be pretty cheap. There's no reason to pay that much for a spark plug and unless you are driving some kind of performance automobile that requires a very rare and expensive kind of spark plug, it shouldn't be that necessary to pay that much for the part. If a dealer or a mechanic is doing a spark plug replacement for you and they charge you $40 or $50 for a spark plug, you should be making sure that's exactly what you want. You need to know that a more expensive spark plug doesn't necessarily make it a better spark plug. You can find higher-end the spark plugs that might cost you $40 a piece as well. The majority of spark plugs cost about $10 a piece. You can go to a site like AutoZone right now and you'll see that you can pick up new spark plugs for as little as $6.

As with any repair job, the majority of the cost you're paying to mechanic use for the labour. Spark plugs themselves are not that expensive.

Spark plugs cost