Bio-ethanol – day three

October 17, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Well, sort of day two really as I didn’t go anywhere yesterday.

This morning I went to Frankfurt on the motorway and was able to test the accelaration properly – I am more than impressed and I think it was even smoother and faster than my last car (maybe because the engine is a bit more powerful anyway).

This afternoon I had to go to Friedrichsdorf which took me through the middle of Bad Homburg. Again, apart from being a bit more powerful there I don’t think I could have told that bio-ethanol was in the tank if I didn’t actually know.

I managed to stall a couple of times on the car park, however. As it was 15°C I don’t think this can be down to the cold we had the rest of the week. Maybe it was me being too careful?

I have done just over 100km and that has used about 1/4 of the tank apparently, the board computer tells me that I have 500km left (the tank is currently filled just with E85 bio-ethanol and not yet mixed with normal petrol). This works out at 12l/100km, which is 23.5 mpg (UK) or 19.6 mpg (US). [Here is a useful conversion calculator]

Filed Under: Bio-Ethanol, Cars Tagged With: ,

The bio-ethanol car has arrived!

October 15, 2007 By Leave a Comment

The bio-ethanol car that I ordered in August has arrived and I collected it this morning.

On first impression it is a normal Ford Focus, but with one critical difference – it has a power socket at the front to heat up the ethanol in scandanavian countries.

Currently it has a full tank of E85 bio-ethanol fuel and I’ve been driving with it this afternoon both through the town and on the motorway – appart from the initial smell of the ethanol there is no apparent difference in the way it drives.

In the next few weeks I shall be trying out the new petrol station and seeing how the ethanol reacts to the cold temperatures, even mixing it with normal Super (95 Octane) petrol.

focus-flexifuel1.jpg

Filed Under: Bio-Ethanol, Cars Tagged With: ,

Greener driving with Bio-Ethanol

August 28, 2007 By 6 Comments

Today I took a step towards using greener fuels – I ordered a car that runs on Bio-Ethanol.

This may sound all very green, but does this mean that I will have to go to special petrol stations – or will I even find somewhere to fill up?

Well, at home this should not be a problem, as the first Bio-Ethanol petrol station in Germany happens to be in Bad Homburg, so no problems there. For further afield there are a further 90 in Germany at present, according to the site e85.biz.

But what if there isn’t one near when I need to fill up? Well, the thing I like most about this is that the car is a so-called “flexifuel vehicle”. This means, that I can run on normal petrol if I need to or any mixture of the two, they even use the same tank so unlike other types of environmentally-friendly fuels I don’t have to switch over when one of them runs out.

It also costs less than normal petrol – currently the pumps show 130.9 cents per litre for “Super” in Oberursel – the Bio-Ethanol pump in Bad Homburg was showing 89 cents per litre. The main difference is down to tax, and cannot be completely considered as running on pure bio-ethanol can use 30% more fuel than running on normal petrol. But at the moment, that would still be cheaper.

So why is it considered greener? Well, according to the literature that I’ve been given, it’s all down to the CO2 cycle – the plants that grow to make the bio-ethanol fuel have absorbed the CO2 whilst they were growing, and when you run your car on it you just set it free again. The brochure claims that this saves up to 80% of CO2-emissions compared to normal fuel.

Anyway, that was the first step. Next I have to wait for the car to be delivered in a few weeks. I will report back then with my first bio-ethanol experiences.

Filed Under: Bio-Ethanol, Cars

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