Can any gasoline engine car or truck run E85 or is it just newer? I have always been curious and only dealing with diesel fuel i have never worried about it. And if I do fill my wife's or kids vehicles I just use regular gas. Thanks for any help on this!!!

 

Ive heard that E85 lowers your fuel mileage by about 20%.

 

20% shoot try like 50% a guy at work put some in his Nissan Titan and said he only got like 250-275 miles to a tank when he normally gets like 400-425. But i think your car has to be set up to run it. Because it has to inject like twice as much fuel compared to Gas

 

You can only run E85 in vehicles that are designed to use it. Flex fuel vehicles run special fuel lines, rubber pieces and tuning along with a fuel type sensor to let the PCM know what fuel is in there. The fuel is fairly corrosive to rubber and certain types of metal.

What will happen if you run it in a vehicle not prepared? Well it depends how long you try to do it. If you stop at the first tank you'll probably get off lucky and not damage anything. The O2 sensors will read lean conditions due to the E85 and richen up the mixture. When it can't richen the mixture anymore it'll pop a CEL. It could richen the mixture enough, if done long enough, to ruin the cats. You also risk corroding your fuels lines, injector seals, fuel pressure regulator diaphragm among other things.

To be effective as a money saving fuel E85 needs to be approx $.55 cheaper than standard 87 octane and needs to lower your MPG no more than 5 MPG.

 

Flex fueled vehicles only I'm afraid!

 

if you can get someone to get the tuning right e-85 can be ran in any vehicle. i'm on a TurboFord board and there are guys running e85 in early and mid 80's vehicle. it is a super high octane rating, over 100, but required alot more volume of fuel, requires the computer to be compensated for the A/F ratio (gas is 12.5:1 and e-85 is 9.675:1) most turbo guys i know that run it instead of running 35-42 pound per hour injectors are running 80-150 pount per hour injectors to compensate for the volume needed to richen up the a/f ratio. and i also believe the rubber lines and o-ring thing is a myth. this is my personal opinion i've seen cars that were 20+ years old that has been runing it (properly tuned though) since it hit the streets of the US and have yet to have a line failure. some of the older fuel pumps (ie stock 20+ year old units ) corode up since the alcohol in the e-85 absorbs so much water and if you aren't driving it all the time and it sits it'll deposit the water and leave the mineral residue and corode and give someone all sorts of problems. here is a good link to read about e85

E85 in standard engines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Benjamin... Do you think Bio-Diesel ruining rubber is a myth as well? We all know Viton is required for Bio use, and the same thing goes with E85. There is no way around it. Take a piece of rubber fuel line, put it in a shot glass, and pour in a shot of everclear. Come back in 3 days, and the fuel line will still be there, fairly intact as well... but the Everclear will be anything but "ever clear." Instead, it will look murky, coudy, and have a nice tint to it.

Put in an o-ring, let it sit for a week, then come back and try to stretch it slightly, it's tear in half without much force at all. Sure it might not fail in the engine, but if you ever have to remove the part its on your gonna have to replace it (and thats if you can get it out intact). The other thing it can do to you is leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere because your fuel filter plugged up. Ethanol is a great solvent, and things that gas won't dissolve Ethanol usually will... and it'll run right into your fuel filter.

Of course, all of this is only if the engine lasts long enough to get there. Usually they run so lean they'll burn a valve, warp a head from overheating, crack exhaust manifolds... You get the picture?