i learned about E85 from some bmw boost-heads in sweden last year. the cliff's notes are "it's 15% gasoline and the rest is your grandpappy's moonshine". the swedish power addicts love it because it has an effective octane rating about the same as the $5 leaded race gas you occasionally see those guys with the skinny tires on the front of their cars filling up with.
it's good for us because we make it here already (byproduct of corn farming, which removes pollutants from the atmosphere, unlike refining oil), it burns cleaner than gas, and we don't line the pockets of the saudi royal family when we fill up with it.
so HOW good is it? good enough that this fuel alone takes a saab station wagon's power output from BMW 3-series territory on pump gas to turning up one's nose at the WRX STI's output... 310hp & 325ft/lb of torque on E85.
on a final note, think where we might be if we had spent the past few years' worth of Occupying Iraq money on E85 distribution infrastructure- anyone wanna guess what we'd be paying at the pump to say "FY OPEC, i wanna go faster"...?
The downer is that it won't really help N/A engines much (I've watched Evos and STis gain 10MPH bone stock down the main straight at Summit Point raceway just by fueling up with 100 octane. That's goign from 130-140MPH at the braking zone.
Speaking as someone with an 11.5:1 engine, I can tell you it ain't all it's cracked up to be. :p Especially after it spends 9 weeks at a dealer. Built S54 race engines aren't seeing all that much more power on higher octane fuel. vs. 93.
By built race engine, I mean lots of internal work (crank/rods/pistons/valves/springs/cams/etcetera), combined with MoTec engine management and a custom tune. There are very real gains with serious octane increases - the S54 actually gains 5hp going from 93 to 96 octane bone stock, but you just aren't going to see the sorts of gains you'd get from an FI car.
I should note that I tend to think in BMW centric terms. It's what I know. American iron seems to LOVE high octane.
You can get 12.8:1 on pump gas on a new R6.
Not really. Corn neither takes in nor removes "pollutants". It does fix atmospheric CO2, but not all carbon comes from the atmosphere. Further, the (extremely high) processing costs cause a decent amount of pollution. It costs an order of magnitude more energy to turn corn into ethanol than it does to pump oil out of the ground. In the end, we still burn it and put the CO2 right back in the air.
Given that the atmospheric carbon fixing is balanced by the processing costs, you're probably pretty close to carbon-netural, compared to dino oil.
That's not to say I dislike bioethanol. It's renewable and it means we don't have to give any money the Saudis.
that's more for biodiesel than for ethanol. field-to-tank, biodiesel is energy-negative.