Ethanol in Grand Cherokee

Part of the huge problem is that WI gas taxes are WAY too high. For the longest time, the gas tax would AUTOMATICALLY increase every April 1st. (What a cruel joke our state government plays on us) The gas tax rose by

Just my unenlightend opinion

Getting a little off topic but remember when the "gas crisis" hit in

1. I was paying 18cents a gallon retail until then. Most pumps wouldn't go above 50 cents so they would set it at something like 30 cents and then charge you double what was on the pump.

At the time I was a major school bus contractor, trying to buy my own tanker so I could move fuel between terminals. I couldn't find a used truck to buy in the whole country. And when I talked to the terminal people in Miami they said there were 23 super tankers holding off the port because there was no room to empty anymore crude. SHORTAGE is a government term indicating a balance of payments crisis between us and someone else.

About that time I participated in some research on Chevron stations in CA. Turns out their favorite trick was to raise the price of gas a penny every week, then at the end of the month have a big ad campaign about a nickel a gallon price decrease. It worked for them.

Tate

Again, we're paddling rapidly away from Jeeps but...

Wisconsin, while right up there at 31.1 cents/gal, is still behind Hawaii at 35.1 cents/gal, Nevada at 33.3, and sunny California at 32.0 cents. But you're not too far ahead of my home state of Connecticut at

More details at

Lowering at-the-pump taxes has a couple of unpleasant side effects:

2) If your registration were that someplace else, it would have to go up about $230/year to make up the revenue lost if you eliminated the state gas tax. (Assuming 15K miles/year at 20 MPG.) That's one painful lump every time you renew instead of an invisible $4 and change at every fill-up.

4) You reduce whatever incentive there is for some drivers to drive vehicles that don't guzzle fuel. It's a weak effect that really only affects those with the means to buy another vehicle, but it's there.

6) Tolls waste time and fuel for drivers, they cause accidents (Connecticut removed theirs from I-95 after a tractor-trailer drove into a queue of cars and killed 6). Yes, there are transponder technologies but you still need toll stations, a contractor to support the technology and staff to collect tolls from vehicles without transponders, so you are spending a lot more taxpayer money than you would by having fuel stations send in a check for taxes once a month.

Chad Fraker wrote:

Matt:

My e-mail address is valid if you'd like to discuss this further. It is interesting to me, but I don't want to clutter up the newsgroup with it.

Matt Macchiarolo wrote:

If you have a carburetor car you can convert to E85 but you will be stuck with it unless you convert back. You will need a reworked carburetor. We have a local expatriate Brit that runs his Land Rover with its two SUs on E85 in summer, and carries two spares in his parts box should he run out. He has all replacement fuel lines and pump and had the tank sloshed with alcoholproof compound, A lot of our local old motorcycle guys run it too, especially in old single and twin cylinder imported bikes. The Japanese fours are too much work to convert.

The two carb approach works pretty well.

The other way is to go over to a throttle body injection with an aftermarket ECU like MegaSquirt that supports a sensor for the alcohol.

Considering that a good proportion of the alcohol burning cars in Brazil are VWs with almag cases and they are not "vaporizing", and considering the insides of the AEIO-540 Lycs operated on E100 by a US aerobatic team that I saw myself were as clean inside as the day they came out of Williamsport.....I can assuredly state you are on powerful drugs as is so often the case. No pun intended.

What led you to this imaginary idea?

My owners manual says to only use alcohol mix in an emergency to get to real gas no matter how many drying agents they say they put in.....

I also lose 100 miles per tank with the crap.

Have you read the owners manual of your Jeep?

Mike

The fact is taxing gasoline and diesel fuel is the single most efficient and fair way to finance roads there is. Not taxing alternatives until a certain percentage of people convert is the fairest way to incentivize it.

The other problem is that vehicles wear roads disproportionately as to weight. A 1974 Cadillac Eldorado doesn't wear roads any more than a Toyota Tercel, but a tractor trailer at 80,000 lbs wears them at something like thirty times the rate of the Cadillac. The speed of the truck and the distance between the driver and trailer tandems puts a ripple on the road at a certain pitch or length. If trucks paid their proportional share of road wear and services trucking would be much more expensive. Efficient regional railroads, not the highways, are the cheapest and most efficient way to move heavy freight.

Thank you for proving this. E100 in this case means 100 percent Ethanol.

The owner's manual pertains to the stock vehicle. We are talking about modified vehicles. Alcohol is here to stay and you must modify the vehicle for the fuel or buy a new one. If it's old enough to have a carb some refurbishment is about time anyway. This is for the ten percent alcohol. i would leave the 85% aklone in Canada, it's too cold for that up there. As a matter of fact it's too cold up there, period. I would move to Vancouver or emigrate as a climactic refugee....just kidding.

I saw a big Harley hog at the E85 pump the other day and went over to talk to the guy. He is running 11.6:1 compression and twin plugs and a single S&S carb. He was running methanol on the street and buying it in