shakran

Actually the E85 version has racing stripes that are the logo colors of E85




And the article mentioned they tweaked the motor in the E85 version. My point is, if you take the E85 version and run it on E85, it'll be slower and use more gas than if you run the E85 version on regular gasoline.





this has been covered umpteen times in Tilted Motors, but it never hurts to go over it again. Sources have been cited elsewhere so I'm not gonna bother citing them here - if you don't trust me, search for E85 if you can get the search button to work

E85 in the US is primarilly made from corn. Basically all E85 is, is moonshine (corn alcohol) mixed with 15% (roughly - E85 doesn't mean a guaranteed 85% ethanol mix. In the winter it's in the 70's) regular gasoline. Ethanol can be made from anything with sugar in it, because when you're making alcohol all you're doing is fermenting sugar. This would tend to make you think that making ethanol out of sugar would be smarter - and you'd be right. Brazil makes it out of sugarcane and sugar beets, and their ethanol program makes a lot more sense than ours does because they get a much higher energy yield out of their raw materials than we do with ours.

In fact, corn is so relatively miserly in its sugar content (we're talking a corn that's closer in grade to feed corn than sweet corn here - all the sweet corn ends up at farmers markets, and not in your gas tank ) that it takes around 29% MORE energy to make the ethanol than you get out of the ethanol (to power the tractor, make the fertilizer, harvest the corn with the combine, transport the corn to the elevator, elevate it, dump it in a truck, transport it to the ethanol plant, process it into ethanol, then transport the ethanol - - -more on that transport in a minute). Put another way, if ethanol plants were energy efficient enough to make more energy than they put in to making the ethanol, why don't the plants themselves run on the ethanol?


So while the gasoline itself might be more environmentally friendly if you isolate it from its manufacturing process, all you're really doing is moving the environmental damage off to the coal/oil/gas/nuclear power plant that's providing the energy for the ethanol plant.

This analysis of course completely ignores the environmental damage large-scale corn farming causes, and it ignores the fact that studies show if we wanted to completely fuel the USA's vehicles on ethanol, we'd have to plant every square inch of land IN the USA, plus find another farm half the size of the USA, in order to grow enough corn to do it.

And I haven't even gone into the damage ethanol does to engines - it runs hotter than regular gasoline which makes it more likely to overheat (as an example at my station we've had to be extra careful not to get any ethanol-blended fuel (even the 10% stuff) into any of our news vehicles that have generators in them, because the generators run too hot and overheat).

Then we look at the octane of E85. It's 100-105 octane. Regular gas is 85-89 octane depending on where you live. The lower the octane rating the more energy you can get out of the fuel. 105 octane will make your car slower than 85 octane, whether it's ethanol or regular 105 octane race gas. The only reason you want to go up in octane is if your engine is pinging on lower octane, because higher octane fuels are more burn-resistant and therefore won't explode at the wrong time, while the piston is still on its way up the cylinder.

So basically, flex fuel vehicles are a publicity stunt by the auto industry to try and convince a public that (they hope) is gullible enough to believe they give a crap about environmentally friendly cars.

If the auto industry truly cared about the environment they wouldn't have basically halted development of ultra-efficient cars in the 80's. Even today's vaunted hybrid cars are underimpressive - they get 50mpg max, and that's if you get the rolling deathtrap that is the Insight. The 1988 Honda CRX HF got 50mpg and didn't have any exotic technology to do it with. Imagine if we'd continued to develop THAT line rather than worrying about who can stuff 500 horsepower into a supersized SUV?


Anyway, I promised to talk about transporting ethanol. Transporting ethanol is a lot of fun because ethanol absorbs water. Gasoline does not. So you can send gasoline through a pipeline and it'll stay separated from the moisture that gets into any underground pipe - all you have to do is drain off the water at the destination and you have your pure gasoline again.

Do that with ethanol and it'll absorb all the water and be useless by the time it arrives at the distribution center. So you have to transport ethanol by truck, which again adds cost and an energy-efficiency hit to the ethanol picture. In fact ethanol is significantly more expensive to produce than regular gasoline is - the only reason E85 and E10 (the 10% ethanol blend, usually the midgrade gas at the stations that carry it) are in line with or cheaper than regular gasoline is because the federal government gives ethanol a 50 cent per gallon blend tax credit. State governments also heavilly subsidize ethanol, with the net effect that ethanol is cheaper at the pump, but more expensive when you fill out your tax forms.