At present, gasoline occupies one of the leading places among primary energy sources. The need of mankind in it, in its high quality, is greater than in any other fraction of hydrocarbons. Therefore, very high requirements are made to the operational properties of automobile gasoline, and the problem of improving the quality of gasoline is one of the urgent problems of the chemical industry. Modern vehicles require fuel with a high-octane number with properties preventing detonation and having octane numbers of 92, 95 and 98 for engines. High anti-detonation performance can be achieved through complex gasoline processing using catalytic cracking, isomerization and alkylation methods or by adding special high-octane additives to fuel. The world's leading trend in improving the environmental and performance characteristics of motor gasoline is the use of multifunctional additives, in particular oxygenates – compounds containing oxygen (such as alcohols, ketones, esters and others). The use of oxygen-containing components (oxygenates) is one of the promising ways to produce high-octane gasoline. Currently, in industrialized countries, oxygenates are actively used as a preferred substitute for organometallic anti-detonation additives and components of high-octane gasoline. In the presented work the properties of a new oxygenate - dimethyl ethynylcarbinol (DMEC), as an additive that increases the octane number of gasoline, are investigated. The study of the effect of oxygenates as methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) and DMEK on increasing the octane number of reforming gasoline showed that the increase in the octane number of gasoline when adding DMEK and binary additive is higher than when adding MTBE. According to the results of research, tertiary acetylene alcohol - DMEK can be offered as an oxygen-containing additive for automobile gasoline. The use of DMEK allows to expand the resources of high-octane components, reduce the toxicity of gasoline and exhaust gases, increase the production of high-quality commercial gasoline for automotive engines.