General vehicle thread

[Irving]

I wondered about towing, but figured that towing gets bad enough gas mileage. Might not matter if it's the difference in going the speed limit over a pass or not. Not that I'm towing anything heavy with the vehicles I drive, especially with my van.

[Gman]

Techron is good stuff. I'll run it in a tankful about every 3-5K. Look for it at Sam's or Costco in a 6-pack. I do not run E85 in a fuel system not built for it. YMMV.

Best thing to keep your fuel system clean is Top Tier gas. Costco is Top Tier, Sam's is just cheap.

[MrPrena]

~20/20.

If cheaper than 20% , e85ethanol will be considered.

[Irving]

So I usually average between 17-21 mph depending on how much I drive on the highway compared to City driving. The E-85 tank was almost all a highway road trip and I got 15mpg. Pretty poor mileage comparatively.

[ray1970]

So I usually average between 17-21 mph depending on how much I drive on the highway compared to City driving. The E-85 tank was almost all a highway road trip and I got 15mpg. Pretty poor mileage comparatively.

17-21 mph? You must be stuck in a lot of bad traffic.

[Irving]

I drive more aggressively than I should for sure, and when I do get open highway, I'm going fast. Times when I'm stuck behind a semi, or even trying to keep to the speed limit for some other reason, the mpg in the van goes closer to 24mpg.

[ChickNorris]

Seems 106 is my Ford's limit. I expect that's not very fuel efficient.

Separately, one of the times I went to pueblo I used e85 & for what should have been sufficient for a round trip from Denver, turned out to be an extra stop on Fillmore in COS to refuel & it was not with e85.

Hence my previous comments.

[Irving]

That's about the same for my van with the ladder on top.
I also took a trip to basically Pueblo on E-85 with the same experience. Normal gas would have gotten me back home no problem.

[DenverGP]

Yeah, I mainly use E85 for short 1/4 mile trips (up a bandi)

I wouldn't really care about the cost per mile of using E85, but it does suck if I have to drive longer distances... shorter range, plus less availability of e85 fuel, and mine doesn't automatically switch from e85 to regular gas, would need to re-tune, etc. So it's very impractical for anything but fun.

[Gman]

If your vehicle has the aerodynamic profile of a small building, higher speeds will kill mpg. Doing the same while having a drive train optimized for towing will further kill mpg.

Flex Fuel is an interesting idea, but I've never found it compelling compared to gasoline. I'd prefer that corn go to reducing the cost of my Doritos. Putting food into our gas tanks doesn't make any sense to me. If the alcohol is produced from a non-food material, that makes sense to me. Now that we're a net exporter of fossil-fuels, Flex Fuel makes even less sense.