ok i know that ethanol burns less efficiently that straight gas, but how much less efieciently, ive been getting some free gas from HESS and they use a 10% ethanol mix in their gas, and since using it i have dropped a little more that 1 mpg, can i write it off as the ethanols fault, or should i start looking for a problem???

 

contrary to what the 10% tout, I too experience better mileage on "non-reformulated" fuel. On my car, the difference is 2-3mpg

 

I think the drop in gas mileage is mainly because today's engines are not designed to run on ethanol. Kinda like using watered down gas persay.Even those so called E85 vehicles, you will notice a difference in MPG when using E85 and straight fuel. so the cost you save in buying E85 is all lost because your MPG's are less than straight gas. Kinda evens itself out. Also heard that when running E85, you don't have as much power either. E85/less mpg. straight fuel/more mpg. Only advantage to E85 is less pollution.

Maybe if the day ever comes where our society runs 100% on ethanol, then we can see a performance increase and mpg increase as the engines were designed specifically for ethanol.

 

Yes, you will see worse gas mileage with the 10% addition of ethanol. The addition of adding ethanol to the gasoline in standard combustion engines is kind of like adding water to whole milk. Yes you will have a greater volume but that does not mean you have more milk. In my opinion, the move to add ethanol to gas is political and involved with special interest of large oil companies. Their argument is that the addition of ethanol to gas means you have more available gasoline. But when the MPG fall and you have to fill up more than you would before so there actually is the same amount of gas just “watered down�. So the price of gas has either stayed the same or increased and now you end up buying more gas because it is not as effective as pure gas but the profits of oil companies will increase due to the additional spending on the gasoline. Now the reason that it is political as well is the corn that would normally be used for food purposes is now being diverted to making ethanol which in turn raises the food prices globally. “So you control the flow of oil, fine, but we control how much you pay for food� The only people that benefit are the oil companies posting 400 billion dollar profits from the American consumer.[:@]

 

ok so that means that once i go back to regular straight gas my mpgs will go back up (i dont expect alot of improvement, but some would be nice)

 

I noticed that you are from NJ. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as “regular gas� in NJ anymore. I believe that it was mandated that all grades of fuel in NJ contain up to 10% ethanol with one exception, Sunoco Race fuel, 104 octane. That was exempt because it is a specialty fuel and not intended for daily driving.

 

Same here in Tx at least in the large metro areas. All gas stations have the logo of the up to 10 percent ethanol now.

 

umm idk about that, there are only some stations that have the 10% ethanol badged on the pumps, most of them dont have it, (or at least they dont mention that they have it)