Quote:
Originally Posted by ermax
Yeah the display needs scaling and your mileage will drop even more on the next fill up. One other thing I’ve noticed is it pulls smoother at very low RPMs in stop and go traffic. Low as in 1500rpm. It doesn’t rattle and shake like on 93. Cold starts are heavily dependent on the E%. In the winter they change the blend to make cold starts easier. I first switched to E85 at the end of the summer and as it got cold it got to the point where it took 4 tries sometimes. Then the blend switched and I was back to single crank starts. There are some tweaks you can make to help with cold starts but I never got around to trying them. Maybe this winter I will give it a shot.
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I think it may be because the throttle input is more sensitive and strong. My rpm spikes when I give it a small blip. I'm going to test out the car in stop and go traffic and hope it smooths out the car. It would previously chug around when my car reached lower speeds (<10mph) in traffic even if I'm not touching any of the pedals.
As for the e85 blend in California, unfortunately I think we always have the same e% year round (about 83%) because of tax laws.
I found this quote about Pearson e85 from a bmw forums if any California people were interested lol:
I was able to get in touch with California’s largest E85 distributor, Pearson Fuels and this what the CEO had to say about E85 content/quality in California
“That is a great question because the labels that we are required to post on the dispensers by different government agencies can be very confusing. While we do have the ability to vary the blend seasonally, in reality, all the E85 we blend in the entire state is calculated to be blended at 83.3% ethanol. We regularly do field testing and the fuel almost always comes back within 1-2% of 83.3%. This little variance can probably be attributed to variances in the evaporation rates of ethanol and gasoline and the fact that a big tank of thousands of gallons might have some variation throughout the tank, much like you might have an alcoholic drink that can be stronger at the bottom or top.
The California Air Resources Board allows us to blend at a rate lower than 83.3% but if we did that then the price of E85 would have to go up about $.20 per gallon because we would then be subject to state excise tax which we are exempt from now. It is a conflict between air pollution regulations and tax laws so it should continue to be 83.3% unless we make a big social media announcement one day, which we do not see on the horizon.
Very rarely, we will have a blend that is not at the 83% (less than 1% of the deliveries). In that case, if it is still legal E85 then we will sell it and put a sign on the pump that says “Attention Racers: This E85 is blended at XX%. This a temporary situation and when this sign is removed it will revert to 83%”. I think that has happened 2-3 times in the history of the company so it is very much the exception. Every once in a while someone will contact us and tell us that the blend percentage is off or we hear chatter on the social media and when we test the fuel almost every time the blend is right near 83%.”
Mike Lewis, CEO of Pearson Fuels