Can flex-fuel vehicles make it?

Challenges include boosting ethanol’s mileage and expanding access to E85

In the new-car showroom on the Merle Hay auto mile sits a 1915 Ford Model T with its hand-crank starter and an engine that, in its prime, reached 45 miles per hour.

The relic shrinks in the shadow of a fire red 2007 Supercrew pickup sporting a V8 engine that easily can top 75 mph with a 30-foot boat in tow.
Different automobiles from different eras, but Ford designed them for the same purpose. They were to run on ethanol.

Henry Ford abandoned ethanol because gasoline cost less, and almost a century later the cost-per-mile of ethanol remains one of the alternative fuel’s biggest challenges.

“Cost is everything. … You can have the best thing since sliced bread, but if only a small percentage of people buy it, it doesn’t have an impact,” said Daniel Cohn, senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ethanol contains less energy per gallon than gasoline and lowers fuel economy. Mileage drops by about 30 percent with E85, which is a mix of 85 percent ethanol with gasoline.

To make ethanol more marketable, researchers, in collaboration with the world’s largest auto manufacturers, are working to bridge that gas mileage gap. Some of the technology is already here, but other possibilities are at least five years off.

Des Moines Register