Saturday, May 26, 2007

I'm E-Free

My gas mileage has been junk. On the last two tanks of gas I got 14.6 mpg and 16 mpg, and that's mostly highway miles. I usually do mostly in town driving so my normal mileage is worse yet. Today I filled up on ethanol free gas to see if that will make a difference. It's available at the bargain price of $3.71 per gallon at the harbor. The ethanol was destroying boat engines and their fiberglass gas tanks, thus the E-free gas. The way I see it, my body wasn't designed to run on salads so why fuel my Jeep with corn? That may be an odd analogy, but it doesn't make sense to force the American people to put fuel in their cars they weren't designed to burn. And if our cars don't get as good of mileage with the 10% added ethanol, aren't we burning up more fossil fuels anyway?
Posted by at
Labels:

2 comments:

Brian said...

Hey girl,

I'm not sure ethanol-mixed gasoline is as bad as you say - but I don't have facts to back it up.

Mileage can be affected by a lot of things - AC, how close you are to needing an oil change, wheel alignment, etc.

But hang in there.

At this point in the game, being more environmentally friendly isn't going to save you money.

And the oil and U.S. car corporations want to keep it that way.

6:42 PM
baron said...

It's bad. When I did my E-Free experiment on two full tankfulls I got 2mpg better mileage at least.

E-10 gas has ruined many fishmen boat engines (the ethanol dissolves older fiberglass gas tanks schellacing the resins in the engines). Ethanol evaporates more rapidly than petrol, bad for a hot climate like Hawaii. E-10 costs more to produce since they have to bring in the ethanol special. It's more tricky to produce, months ago when they started E-10 they almost decertified Hawaii's entire new gas supply due to a tainted batch of ethanol! They let the tainted gas slide.

Ethanol produced by corn is very enviromentaly taxing. I think the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" shows that it's the way to go. Sure you may burn petroleum to produce electricity but even when that is taken into consideration less petroleum is used.

You're right Brian. The car and oil companies want to keep us in our fossil-fuel vehicles. I applaud companies like Tesla who are producing an electric car with gusto. The future of car companies is going to have to come from Silicon Valley and not Detroit.

8:41 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)