one, two, three, four!
Rev up your engines!
It's time for the Scotty Kilmer Channel
today I'm going to talk about the use of ethanol and gasoline in cars, now Henry
Ford originally made the Model T to run on either ethanol or to run on gasoline,
but in 1927, he came up with the model A that could only run on gasoline, that was
pretty much the end for ethanol, at least until recently
now ethanol is becoming popular again, today ethanol is making a comeback the
United States makes 62 percent of the ethanol produced in the world, while
Brazil produces 25% of the ethanol made in the world, now Brazil uses cars that
run on ethanol, 87 percent of their cars run on ethanol, while in the United
States it's a lot smaller figure, it's only 7% of the cars can run on ethanol,
the main ethanol fuel in the United States is called e85, it's a mixture of 85%
ethanol and 15% gasoline, now it is to contain some gasoline because pure ethanol
is really hard to start a car when it's cold, so the gasoline helps it
start up and run better when it's cold, and as I said, 7% of the car sold in the
United States can use that, they're called flex fuel vehicles, and you can
only use them in Flex vehicles, you cannot use them in a normal vehicle, they
won't run right on e85, now if you're not sure if your car is, just get your VIN
number, call up a dealer, they can tell you if it's a flex fuel or not, if it is
a flex fuel vehicle, you can use e85, now here in Texas, being an oil state, E85 is
not that popular, I was going to do a little shoot at an e85 station, but it's was going to
take me an hour and a half round-trip to even get there where I could find one,
but if you live in the farmland, hey they'll be all over the place, because
the farmers love E85, they grow the corn they make a lot of money selling
the corn, and the corns turned into the ethanol, like this, the corn goes to a
refining plant, where it's turned into barrels of ethanol, but the truth of the
matter, in the United States, most of that ethanol is used to boost octane in your
regular gasoline, if you use regular gas look at the pump, it'll say may contain
10% ethanol, well I guarantee you most of it as 10% ethanol, but if you do
have a flex-fuel car and you want to run it on E85, here's the pluses and
minuses of that, since ethanol contains about 20% less pure energy than gasoline
you're going to get about 20% worse gas mileage using e85, then you will using
gasoline, but ethanol burns cleaner, your car's going to pollute less, and it
actually runs better in the engine, and makes the engine run cleaner and
actually can last longer, and since a modern e85 cars really complex, it can
run on any mixture, you could put one tank of pure gasoline, then later you can
mix that with E85, the computers on board are able to make it run perfectly
with any mix of alcohol and gasoline in a flex-fuel car, I've got customers with
them, and sometimes they drive them like this, if they're just doing regular city driving
they use gasoline to get little better gas mileage, but if they go on
the highway, they want a little more power on a trip, they use the e85 and it
runs so much smoother and they have a little bit more power, if you live in
Brazil, you're not going to have any choice, it's pretty much mandated that you're
going to use some type of ethanol gasoline mixture to run your car on, but
here in the United States, you got free room you can pick to use it, or pick not
to use it it's your choice ultimately, and as
Henry Ford originally believed, you can make ethanol out of any kind of biomass,
so a lot of waste products you could turn into ethanol, if we run out of
gasoline, we can switch to ethanol just like that, and remember if you
have any car questions, just visit the Scotty Kilmer channel,
so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that Bell!