GM To Offer 18 Flex-Fuel Models for 2009

The questions is, will anyone buy these hulking inefficient beasts with gas prices over $4/ gallon?!

I would like to see subsidies ended on all fuels. The 61 cents that Ethanol gets is minimal. The $5.65 Big Oil gets is not talked about in polite company.

Were all subsidies ended, Methane and Ethanol would be on a level playing field with Big Oil. If not ahead of Big Oil.

Savings don't stop there, we would no longer need a military ten times as large as we currently have. The absolute scale of change that is possible is staggering. Debt could be a thing of the past. America could begin to rebuild it's reputation and prestige in the world.

To answer Your questions above:

I am running E-66 in an old 1992 Subaru Legacy by blending 3 parts of E-85 with one part 87 octane pump gas. For commutes around town my MPG is the same as with pump gas. I am saving about 50 cents a gallon, and am directing over half my transport dollars to local American business.
see: http://tinyurl.com/5nftmm

Nearly any car with a cast iron sleeved engine can use E-85/pump gas in ratios from 50/50 to as high as 7 to 4 in my experience, depending on the car's computer.


While corn is a low yield crop, most critics don't count corn by products in the value stream. http://tinyurl.com/5k6hnr

You can get much more out of fodder beets, cattails, sorghum, etc. Farmers will learn to adapt. Fodder beets if planted on the 40 million acre conservation land bank could net about 44 billion gallons of ethanol. almost one third of our auto needs. Cattails could supply all our needs for fuel on under 2% of our 1.3 billion acres of ag land.

Corn ethanol is primarilly a farm subsidy program, NOT an environmental program. It is expensive to the treasury, is causing rapid inflation in food prices and is doing little to reduce CO2 emissions. That makes flex fuel cars an expensive and environmentally ineffective gimmick. What we need from GM (and all manufacturers) are cars that get SIGNIFICANTLY more miles per gallon and emit SIGNIFICANTLY less CO2 per mile, period.

I do not understand two things:
1.) would it not be more practical to make as many gas stations as possible e05, e10, or e15 ethanol, which does not require modification of the basic vehicle engine design, before modifying an infrastructure with 1600 stations to use e85 fuel?
2.) is the ethanol in the proposed e85 system going to come from corn? There has been a lot of talk in the news recently that using corn and other food crops to make e85 is not the most efficient use of this crop, from the point of view of feeding people in poor countries.

It's good to see that GM is promoting a good product. The more vehicles on the road that are capable of using E-85, the more likely they will take off the tariff on Brazilian ethanol. That in turn will snowball the E-85 use. Then maybe, they can eliminate the subsidies(only if they remove all fuel subsidies). Ethanol producers are not getting the 51 cent blenders tax credit! Most of the ethanol producers (probably not ADM or Poet) sell there product to a broker, who in turn sells it to a blender(most likely an oil company or fuel terminal) who gets the subsidy. That's right, the oil companies that have always been getting tax breaks from the Govt. get more tax credits when they blend their fuel with ethanol to make E-10. One gallon of ethanol will make ten gallons of E-10 which in turns earns them 51 cents of tax credits or about 5 cents per gallon of E-10 sold. So,,, much of the huge oil profits are getting by with lower tax bills while the farmers and ethanol producers are getting the blame for tax credits from paid misinformants. Ethanol is a good and enviromentally friendly product which is perfectly capable of thriving without subsidies and economics will sort out all of this out, if misinformations by the paid liers doesn't turn the public against the industry.

If you want to review this in greater detail their is a good book on the subject called "Energy Victory", a video of the author delivering a presentation on the subject is also available at. http://www.energyvictory.net/energy_victory_tour.htm