What would it take to make a slant run and live happily on E85 gasohol. What about E85 and a turbo. A proper fuel injection set-up and stainless valves are almost definately requirements. I have no plans to attempt this, but I live in the middle of farm country and can't go a day without hearing the word ethanol. The dealership I work at has gotten a lot a questions from customers about it and I know that some caravans are flex fuel, But we also sell Hondas and their official response is NO E85. In case you don't know what E85 is it is 85% corn alcohol currently sells for about $1.60 a gallon and has a octane rating in excess of 100. Just though this would be a nice discussion topic.

Not nearly as much of a miracle as it would take for it to make economic sense. Sure, E85 costs less than gasoline, but it also contains a LOT less energy per unit volume. A gallon of gasoline contains approximately 125,000 BTU. A gallon of ethanol contains approximately 84,000 BTU. So, a gallon of E85 contains approximately 90,150 BTU, or only 72% of the energy in a gallon of gasoline. That alone translates to a 28% reduction in miles per gallon (if you're getting 20 mpg on gasoline, you'll get 14.4 on E85 just due to the lower energy content, even worse after factoring in the other operational differences between E85 and gasoline.)

And that assumes you could just dump E85 in a gasoline-only car and have it run at all, let alone reliably, and have it last. But you can't; the entire fuel system must be replaced with components that will survive with alcohol. This includes all components that come in regular contact with liquid or vaporous fuel. Fuel tank and filler, all lines, pump, filter, fuel gauge sender, charcoal cannister, all engine bay vacuum hoses and vacuum valves/solenoids. You won't find a street-compatible carburetor that's made of alcohol-compatible materials unless you go shopping in Brazil, so better figure on retrofitting fuel injection. You'll need alcohol-tolerant fuel injectors; regular ones won't cut the mustard, as well as tolerant fuel injector seals, fuel rail, pressure regulator. There's a lot of high-grade stainless steel and expensive exotic elastomers involved. The factory even uses different (and more expensive) valve stem seals and engine gaskets on their flex-fuel vehicles 'cause the ordinary items don't hold up with alcohol. You can probably get away with somewhat less-pricy materials than are used when the vehicle might be used with M85 (Methanol), but an upgrade from standard will nevertheless be needed. And you'd certainly want to do engine modifications (increased compression ratio, different camshaft, etc.) to try and get back some of the power loss due to the 28% lower energy content. So, in round numbers, let's say a complete and thorough do-it-yourself conversion would run $4000 in parts and labor (with your own labor at $0.00/hr).

Doing-out the maths, then, we have 100,000 miles' worth of gasoline (5000 gallons = $15,000 at $3/gallon) or $4000 plus 100,000 miles' worth of E85 (6945 gallons = $11,112 + $4000 = $15,112) so the economic break-even point is at or around 100,000 miles. Wanna change the numbers? OK, cut the cost of the conversion in half, $2000, now the break-even point is somewhere in the mid-90,000-miles range even if gasoline is $3/gallon.) And during those 100,000 miles, the car won't run, drive or perform nearly as well as on gasoline.

But wait, that break-even calculation assumes using nothing but E85 for those 100,000 miles, and E85 isn't all that widely available. So unless those 100,000 miles are all driven within emergency distance of an E85 filling station, some of those miles are going to be on gasoline. Oops, guess we can't raise the engine's compression high enough to get back a significant proportion of the 28% loss, or else the engine will self-destruct when we have to run it on gasoline. Or, maybe we can run a high compression ratio (or a lot of boost), but now we need better than just a bare-bones EFI conversion; we'll have to have a very advanced and adaptive system...so maybe our conversion's now a $6000 deal instead of $4000.

And as though that weren't enough, the relatively low price of ethanol is probably only temporary, for the enormous Federal subsidies for fuel ethanol are currently set to expire in 2007. If that happens, and it very well might, then the price of ethanol-containing fuels will jump very high, very fast. It takes a great deal of energy to produce a gallon of ethanol, and most of that energy comes from petroleum (Diesel and gasoline powered farm machinery used to plant, tend and harvest the corn, petrol-based fertilizers and pesticides applied to the crop, transport of the corn to processing facilities, processing the corn into ethanol, transporting the ethanol to blending stations, transporting the E85 to filling stations...), so it is a mistake to think that ethanol is a magic solution to high per-gallon prices.

The real solutions include driving more-efficient vehicles fewer miles, and developing new fuel sources (see Here).