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Saturday, October 25, 2008

E85/Flex Fuel Experience

  • I experimented with E85/Flex Fuel during June and July of 2008. Even with existing price difference of the E85 and regular unleaded fuel today, I am pretty sure this is relavant.

Due to the rising fuel cost many people are scrambling to find cheapest way to fuel their vehicles or cut amount of driving. I'm a typical middle class American and a cheapskate who does not want to pay too much at the pumps. Solution - I happen to own 2004 Dodge Stratus that can take advantage of this E85/Flex Fuel instead of traditional unleaded gasoline. I can go on and on about the car but I won't on this page.
The price is the main selling point of this fuel. As of June 2008, regular unleaded is about $3.90/gallon vs. E85 is about $2.90/gallon. A quick math tells me that typical fill up of 12 gallons will save me $12.00, SUPER! This alone convinced me to try it out but then I was quickly challenged with a problem. Finding the damn gas station that has this fuel. I know only 2 stations in town and I would have to drive to those locations to fill up everytime. This really sucked.
The effiency of the fuel is the most discouraging part of the switch. I got in the habit of calculating how many miles to a gallon I can get on this vehicle every fill up. With my normal (aggressive) driving, I can get up to about 24.5 miles/gallon on regular unleaded fuel. When I made the switch, I did expect a drop in efficiency as people have warned me about it. After going through the 1st tank of E85, I calculated miles/gallon & miles/dollar to see if I am saving money by switching. I won't bore you with arithmatic on how I derived these number but I got about 20.5 miles/gallon which translated to 0.75 miles/dollar benefit. Saving is saving. The next fill up was very disappointing. More frequent fill up and finding the gas station carrying E85 is bad enough but getting 18.5 miles/gallon on my 2nd fill up was not acceptable. My wife's a Nissan Exterra with 4.0L engine can get 17 miles/gallon on regular unleaded and it's an SUV, enough said.
Bottom line, my next fill up won't be the much hyped E85/Flex Fuel but rather the good ol' regular unleaded fuel at any convenient locations.
Update: My 3rd fill up of E85 yielded ~17MPG, even worse than the previous average. It's no secret that I've switched back to regular gasoline since then.

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