RE: New widget helps cut fuel costs?
Wednesday 16th August 2006
New widget helps cut fuel costs?
Allows car to run on low-tax bio-ethanol
  The widget installed in the Elise |
With a litre of fuel busting the £1 barrier, cheaper motoring is high on the agenda for most of us. Combine that with cleaner fuel and enhanced performance and you've got the dream car.
Green Fuels, based near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, reckons it's got a product which can do that. It's selling a matchbox sized gizmo which changes an ordinary petrol driven car into a clean one by converting it to run on bio-ethanol E85.
One end of the Fullflex Gold Bi-Fuel Manager plugs into the vehicle’s engine management unit while the other is attached to the injectors. Once fitted – an hour long job for a garage – the vehicle can run on 100 per cent bio-ethanol E85, unleaded petrol or a mix of both. The results are reduced emissions, cheaper fuel and a power boost.
Fullflex Gold Bi-fuel Manager has been used for the last 20 years in Brazil where sugar beet – used in the making of bio-ethanol – is plentiful.
Bio-ethanol is seen as the way forward towards more environmentally friendly motoring. Both Ford and Saab have recently launched FlexiFuel cars while over 9,000 such vehicles have been sold in Scandinavia in the last few months.
Morrison’s supermarket chain, for one, has bio-ethanol pumps on forecourts in Norfolk and Somerset where the fuel is 2p per litre cheaper than premium unleaded.
The Fullflex Manager costs between £450 and £550, dependent on the number of cylinders, and is available from Green Fuels which is the sole distributor for the UK and the rest of Europe.
Caveat emptor of course: we haven't tried it...
Discussion
Fire99 said:
2p per litre?? Thats still gonna take a while to get the £500 back..
Surely Bio-Ethanol should be noticably cheaper than that??
Surely Bio-Ethanol should be noticably cheaper than that??
If it was widely-available, as it is in places like Sweden, California and Brazil, the price would tumble as various fuel companies try to undercut each other. You'd also pay less tax for using an alternative fuel, you'd be causing less damage to the environment so the Greenies would get off your back, 'gas-guzzling' wouldn't be an issue and science, rather than knee-jerk reactions and banning things, would be back at the top of the climate change agenda. Best of all, absolutely nothing would change about the motoring experience.
All of the above forms the reason why the government don't want you to know about it. Keeping the British motorist in the dark ages allows them a greater degree of control and more reasons for taxation.
David Cameron, however, has committed himself to getting this stuff on sale around the UK. With any luck he'll win the next election.
It's been a long time since Chemistry at school...
For the same liberated energy (i.e. equivalent volumes of gases produced to push pistons down with the same force) how much less CO2 is produced as a result of burning bio-ethanol in the presence of oxygen compared with burning petrol?
Surely you get CO2 and H20 as a result of both reactions - but I can't remember them!
Current government thievery based on the premise of CO2 production being the root of all evil. Quantitative facts in this area would therefore be interesting.
For the same liberated energy (i.e. equivalent volumes of gases produced to push pistons down with the same force) how much less CO2 is produced as a result of burning bio-ethanol in the presence of oxygen compared with burning petrol?
Surely you get CO2 and H20 as a result of both reactions - but I can't remember them!
Current government thievery based on the premise of CO2 production being the root of all evil. Quantitative facts in this area would therefore be interesting.
Any change will be govt driven. As they take most out of the fuel cost in Duty, then Vat, then Vat on the duty etc etc (
) any change that the fuel company makes would be small potatoes (or sugar beets / canes).
In Sweden the government have reduced tax on E85 and E85 cars get free parking in cities and exemption from congestion charges. net result is that the Focus E85 outsells normal Focus by over 3 to 1....
) any change that the fuel company makes would be small potatoes (or sugar beets / canes). In Sweden the government have reduced tax on E85 and E85 cars get free parking in cities and exemption from congestion charges. net result is that the Focus E85 outsells normal Focus by over 3 to 1....
darren said:
Great for deforesting the Amazon...
Good point, but i think the idea is that these types of plants will grow in really poor soil so that otherwise practically barren areas can be put to use.
Only problem is see is in growing enough plants to meet the demand. If you think about how many millions of years worth of plant matter has gone into creating our current oil reserves, can we really grow enough of the stuff to power every car on the planet.
Seems to me like it will be more of an intermi solution to reduce the climate change affect rather than put an end to it. Its a resonalby easy technology to apply to existing engine designs and it gets manufacturers and consumers alike to start thinking about 'green' products.
The UK puts the same duty on all "hydrocarbon" fuels, meaning that bio-diesel and bio-petrol attract the same 45p/l duty as regular fuels. In some European countries duty only applies to "mineral" fuels (ie ones that are dug out of the ground), giving a real incentive to move to biofuel.
jackass said:
The UK puts the same duty on all "hydrocarbon" fuels, meaning that bio-diesel and bio-petrol attract the same 45p/l duty as regular fuels. In some European countries duty only applies to "mineral" fuels (ie ones that are dug out of the ground), giving a real incentive to move to biofuel.
No they put 2p/litre less duty on these fuels.
The problem in the case of bio-ethanol is that it is less energy dense, so you use more litres and in effect it costs you more to use it despite it being 2p/litre cheaper. The consumption when measured by distance/unit volume is about 30% higher with BioE85 (85% bioethanol 15% petrol) compared to petrol. I don't know the situation when using a diesel ethanol mix but I guess it will be greater difference. Therefore you would never recover the £500 in today's fiscal climate.
As someone said above compare the 2p miserly concession with what Sweden is doing, not just fuel taxes, but also the other stuff, lower benefit in kind taxation on company vehicles, free parking, no congestion charging, insurance savings and so on.
Sadly one must conclude that firstly, HM Govt have not a clue when it comes to these technologies, and secondly that they are not serious when it comes to reducing carbon emissions as there are far more effective and cheaper ways to do it. Also sadly it appears that they merely arrange things to continue to drag in huge amounts of tax revenue to spend on possibly misguided social engineering and their own snouts in the trough of running Government.
Humbug!
Edited by Flat in Fifth on Wednesday 16th August 16:41
polus said:
Hypothetical question here:
If I grew sugar cane in my back garden and then had a refining plant in my dining room
, would that fuel be liable to tax if I used it in my own car only?
If I grew sugar cane in my back garden and then had a refining plant in my dining room
, would that fuel be liable to tax if I used it in my own car only?Yes, rather in the same way that people have been nicked for running home made bio-diesel and used chip shop oil when they have not paid the fuel duty.
If you could get a vehicle to run on water or fresh air, the Chancellor would still want his fuel duty per litre of the fuel.
Yet from my understanding of the situation HMC&E along with the police and other enforcement bodies have an exemption and they can run bio-diesal and the like without paying fuel duty. Stinks or what?
Flat in Fifth said:
polus said:
Hypothetical question here:
If I grew sugar cane in my back garden and then had a refining plant in my dining room , would that fuel be liable to tax if I used it in my own car only?
If I grew sugar cane in my back garden and then had a refining plant in my dining room
, would that fuel be liable to tax if I used it in my own car only?Yes, rather in the same way that people have been nicked for running home made bio-diesel and used chip shop oil when they have not paid the fuel duty.
If you could get a vehicle to run on water or fresh air, the Chancellor would still want his fuel duty per litre of the fuel.
Yet from my understanding of the situation HMC&E along with the police and other enforcement bodies have an exemption and they can run bio-diesal and the like without paying fuel duty. Stinks or what?
Yeah it stinks... humph
Many new cars can already run on ethanol - US market for E85 is growing as well as large Scandanavian sales of the fuel, so the manufacturers have already been and done it. Ethanol will give up to 17% more power, but needs a richer mixture. The only down side (apart from the oil companies not wanting farmers to supply raw material) is that there can be some fuel hose and seal swell in older cars.
Gavin
Gavin
unobtainum said:
It is all irrelevant anyway. The fuel companies and the governement will always find ways to keep the price high.
Yesterday I traveled from Dorset to Bucks, the fuel cost varied from 96.9 to 101.9.
Someone was making a much bigger profit than the others.
Yesterday I traveled from Dorset to Bucks, the fuel cost varied from 96.9 to 101.9.
Someone was making a much bigger profit than the others.
103 a litre in a local garage just 35 miles north of London
Filling my heating oil tank this time last year was £650 this year it will just touch £1000
..........but then never mind, according to this government today, the annual rate of inflation is 2.4 %
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