Would you believe a full sized V8 pickup truck gets 30 mpg? Not in the real world, or on the highway, but in the the US government Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) calculations.
How does this happen? Well the CAFE people wanted to promote ethanol burning cars. So, any car or truck that will run on ethanol gets its real MPG doubled for the CAFE number. Which is how Detroit is planning to meet the 40 mpg CAFE requirement that is coming at them.
Vehicles that can run on ethanol are referred to as "flex fuel" vehicles. They will run on pure alcohol, pure gasoline, or any mixture of the two fuels. Actually, they aren't hard to make. You have to pay attention to the materials used for gaskets, hoses and seals in the fuel system. Alcohol attacks some commonly used elastomers, but materials that can stand up to both alcohol and gasoline are available. And the fuel injectors (nobody uses carburetors anymore) have to automatically richen the mixture as the alcohol content rises. This isn't hard for microprocessors to do. In short, it is easy to make any production vehicle into a flex fuel vehicle. Cheap too.
Right now, all the vehicles sold in Brazil are flex fuel, and somewhere around 20% of Detroit production is flex fuel.
Of course, you have to believe in ethanol for all this to make sense. Farmers love ethanol for obvious reasons, but it is not clear that ethanol production saves on oil consumption, the tractor fuel, the synthetic fertilizer, the transportation fuel, and the fuel to heat the still makes ethanol a questionable product. Energy gain from ethanol is low, perhaps less than one. Nobody claims more than 1.3 for best energy gain. Plus ethanol amounts to burning food to drive our cars. Have you noticed the prices at the grocery store lately? Burn enough food and the price goes up.
Without hefty subsidies from us taxpayers, ethanol would go out of business. Could this be one small way to balance the federal budget?
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