Ford Used Cars

Q.I'm looking at the September issue of MotorTrend. There's an article titled "Gas Pump Pain Relief, Chevy's excellent alternatives to high fuel bills." Within the first four paragraphs, there are a lot of weird assertions by the author, and I want to hear from you smart guys about the whole thing. The first thing that strikes me as disingenuous is the title of the article. The only reason E-85 is cheaper than gasoline now is because of the corn subsidies. Not only that, but the price of corn is skyrocketing, which will make E-85 more and more expensive to produce. Add that to the fact that you don't get as many miles for a gallon of E-85 and you're not looking at any type of pump pain relief, are you? Second: "More than a decade ago, Chevy began developing FlexFuel Vehicles capable of running on E85 ethano, regular gasoline, or any mix of the two." Seems to me that Chevy didn't do anything, at least publickly, with flexfuel until two or three years ago. Yet Ford has been putting FFV 3.0 Vulcans in Tauruses (Tauri?) since the 90's, IIRC. How did Chevy get all this great eco-press and Ford languishes in oblivion? Ford doesn't even seem to get any press credit for having pioneered in producing the Escape Hybrid SUV, which was a first-in-class achievement. Third: "... General Motors researchers have found that engines running on ethanol last longer." Hmmm... That's not intuitive to me at all. Alcohol is a better lubricant than gasoline? Only when greasing the skids when you're trying to pick up that hot girl at the bar. ;-) My guess is that these test vehicles are getting more TLC than most cars on the road, and that variable would be the reason why alky engines are lasting longer, if they are. Fourth: "Many drivers report more power and superior drivability." I have no idea about drivability, other than to say that dry gas is alcohol, so perhaps E-85 is more immune to water-in-the-gas issues. But the idea of E-85 having more power in a FFV doesn't seem right at all. My understanding is that alky produces a lower amount of power when combusted. The only way I can see an alky vehicle having more power is if you significantly increase the compression ratio to take advantage of the 105 octane of E-85. Fifth and finally: "Most of the energy in E85 comes from renewable resources. Growing corn to produce ethanol draws carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to global warming, from the atmosphere. The solar energy that drives corn farming is free..." Okay, this is just weeerd logic. The alcohol portion of E85 indeed is produced (in this country) from corn. Yes, corn plants draw their energy from the sun. I recently read, however, that there is a very small difference between the amount of energy produced by making ethanol, and the amoung of energy used to produce ethanol. The fields are plowed and prepared by diesel powered tractors, there's a tremendous amount of energy used when converting corn to alcohol, etc. Considering that so much fossil fuel is used to produce alky, it's dishonest to suggest that E-85 is a renewable resource. show me where I'm wrong. The only way I see E-85 being a reasonable fuel source for the future is if we did the following things: 1. Corn should not be subsidized as it is now when the price for and market for corn are so high. But that will balance out the price of E-85 and the price of gasoline at the pump and make E-85 unattractive. Even so, we cannot afford as a nation to federally subsidize more and more corn growth to artificially make E-85 worthwhile. 1. The tractors and facilities that convert the corn to ethanol would need to also be powered by ethanol. 2. Cars would have to become E-85 only to fully take advantage of the increased octane of E-85. Then they wouldn't be flex fuel vehicles anymore. 3. A LOT more land will have to be converted for farm use. Everyone raves about Brazil's E-85 system, but just yesterday I saw an article deploring how the rain forest and other parts of the environment are being damaged or re-purposed to produce the farmland needed to grow all that sugar cane they use. Sugar cane is a better source of sugar for making E85 than corn is, and Brazil can't even manage to power their much smaller fleet of cars without rasing the dander of environmentalists. How in the world are we going to be able to produce enough corn to power our fleet of American cars?

A.Brazil's highly-touted program has problems, even with that government's hegemony over the people, the much more favorable fuel conversion of sugar cane vs. corn, and a more limited automotive culture, in overall volume if nothing else. I have nothing against biofuel (I even made some and ran it in a ?1 Ford, back in the heyday of the ORIGINAL Mother Earth News), but it seems that more and more cropland is being diverted to grow corn-for-fuel, when there are things like native switch grass that will grow quite nicely on "crapland", and switch grass has an ethanol conversion potential that's comparable to sugar cane, plus the grass grows with virtually zero tillage and NO annual re-seeding. Corn-to-ethanol is really a bust, and is just a government subsidy and vote buying mechanism. Corn prices ARE way up, at least as far as the large chicken farmers are concerned; several have filed for bankruptcy and others are examining "re-structuring", i.e., layoffs & wage/benefit cuts.

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