It makes perfect sense it would run on E85, as it has a far higher octane rating than any gas available for purchase otherwise. All they had to do was increase compression ratio and viola, more power.

Sweet XDXDXD

It is way cool. It can boost the male ego without harming the enviroment (not as much as a gas powered one). It proves E85 fueled vehicles do not have to be wimpy.

One should also check out the 012 from Obvio.
http://www.obviousa.com It is really neat and it too uses E85.

It would be neat if GM/Chevrolet came out with a flex fuel Corvette. They have some trucks and suv that have flex fuel. They should have one for the Corvette and the Humvee (macho and good for the enviroment). :)

How about a real picture instead of these lame photochops?

with E85 fuel probably getting 10mpg or less. Mileage on E85 fuel is terrible

I think it's funny how people say "we developed this to run off e85" when any car can actually run off E85, and many race cars have been doing it for a while.

E85 actually give's worse mileage though, so I can't imagine how low his MPG's are with that thing.

I don't really think this says all that much for the e85. I would be more impressed if they got 600 hp from e85 out of the 427ci. Gm could probably have got another 95 hp out of the motor by increasing the size to 500ci.

If they want to build something really special, they should try the direct injection ethanol boosting with an ls3.

This whole e85 flex fuel thing, is garbage. Either use it as a knock suppresant or build an engine that only runs on e85. The way it is now, when you use e85 you pollute more, not less.

I think this is great as it forces people to accept that there are viable alternatives to gasoline even for us motor heads.
Its dissapointing that it takes private individuals to drive the whole initiative though.

The government should be forcing gas stations to also sell alternative fuels and pushing car companies harder to produce ranges of alternative fuel vehicles that aren't all as expensive and undesireable as priuses.

@Niz:

I agree with the majority of your post. The only exception is that E85 will decrease mileage. The emissions are better though. If you can live will decreased mileage (about 10% off regular gas), but cleaner emissions and theoretically homegrown fuel, than E85 is a viable alternative. It still requires a mixture w/ gasoline to be viable, but it is a start in clean technology. Anything to ween us off of total dependance.

I find it awesome. Not more so that the e85 etc...
But that the fact taht someone is willing to push the envelope on a product, that many (myself included) would have thrown up a frown on.

MPG lower- yes that is a fact.
E85 cost- Not yet proven
Fact that E85 can be home grown, AND can power a Vette with 600HP, not that is awesome.

$90 a barrel, as of today, for OIL, is gonna make $3.50 a gallon a reality. Instead of giving that money overseas, (Africa, arabia, south america),, it is time we atleast make our farmers rich by just flat out growing our fuel..

Leno isn't very bright and this car is a reflection of that.

If the engine is custom built to accept only E85 only, do to a higher compression ratio, the gas milage would be the same if not better then an engine that ran only normal gas.

yes, E85 has a lower energy content then normal gas, but since it has a higher Octane rating, an engine with a higher compression ratio will overcome this. just think diesel

"I think this is great as it forces people to accept that there are viable alternatives to gasoline even for us motor heads."

Yes, alternatives that get significantly less mpg (meaning you burn more and therefore pay way more), jack up the price of corn (meaning higher food costs for anything using corn), and isn't close to being viable due to the fact that it would require insane amounts of land to run everything off of. Good plan there....

You want a viable alternative? Two words - Bio and Diesel. Mix that with companies such as BMW that actually know how to get more than 1/2 hp per liter from a diesel and you have a car that's fast as hell AND gets great mpg. Best of both worlds.

I would have to completely agree with what Remy LeBeau states in his post.

Remy LeBeau & Dave,

I'm with you both.

Jay Leno has a serious addiction problem (he owns hundreds of cars and I'm sure the DMV alone is billing him thousands per month). Like cocaine, crank, or alcohol, he needs serious intervention or he's going to be found dead with a distributer in his cold dead hands in the not too distant future.

the only green alternative to gasoline is natural gaz not ethanol! it costs an arm and a leg a a sea of water to produce the damn corn neede for north american ethanol

the only green ethanol is in brazil where they produce it from industrial waste (cane sugar residue)

so this green talk of the fat Jay is bullocks!

I wonder how many corn farmers and pen pushers stood in line to shake hands with Jay for him to even think of such a stupid concept.

If you want great mileage, go diesel.
If you want it to be environmentally friendly, go biodiesel.
If you want it to be oh-so powerful, make it a V8 twin turbo biodiesel.
And if you really want to make the Saudis and Detroit fill their daipers, put together a biodiesel-electric hybrid.

It won't take too long before the Europeans with their diesel technology and the Japanese with their hybrid know-how will put 2 and 2 together. Not even Dick Cheney with a shotgun will stop that.

"The engine is built around a custom aluminum cylinder block that was CNC-milled from a single block of billet aluminum... uses a one-off reciprocating assembly, including a forged steel crankshaft, forged rods and forged pistons..."

If it makes Leno feel any better, when that engine pukes he'll be able to drop in the pending factory ZR-1/SS 600+hp LS3/supercharged combo as an upgrade.

I mean, I appreciate a good greazer as much as the next guy, but at what point does value completely exit your thought process?

@CKV

I can only hope I die this way.

I agree that E85 is definitely not a viable alternative.

@Allen (first post):

Octane has nothing to do with the amount of heat energy a fuel contains. It just determines how much heat it takes to ignite the fuel in the cylinder. Higher compression engines require higher octane fuels because otherwise, the fuel ignites too soon and you get pre-detonation.

It would be more fun if it was 85% nitroethanol instead of plain old boring ethanol.

Dave,

Yes, higher octane allows for a higher compression ratio. The thermal efficiency of an otto or diesel cycle engine is directly related to the compression ratio. Thus, a higher octane fuel allows for an engine that has more available power since less energy is being wasted during the cycle.

I hope Jay Leno learns that E85 is anything but green. If he really wanted a true "green" Vette, he should have gone for Hydrogen powered.

http://www.dailytech.com/Biofuels+Salvation+or+Crimes+Against+Humanity/article9436.htm

As a brazilian, I can give you guys some advice about e85

Gas mileage: about 70% of the same engine running on gas.

Someone said ethanol here is produced of industry waste. NO its not! They grow cane, a lot of it, to produce ethanol. if they have excess of ethanol, sometime they produce sugar, based on market needs.

Ethanol is excellent for high performance cars. With e100 (or pure ethanol as we have it here) you can put a compression rate as high as 14:1 and still put a turbo on it. That mean easy, very easy 300hp on a 2litter turbo.

Maybe if the US cant produce the ethanol they need, at least they can buy it from diferent countrys, and dont be "slaves" of the midle east. And thank god, we can still produce ethanol as long as we need, i cant say the same about oil....

'Jay Leno worked with Pratt & Miller'

Oh my god. Detroit doesnt know how to make cars, so they consult entertainers.

If this continues, you get two dollars for one Eu soon.

Depending on how you do the calculations people say the production of ethanol for autos (from corn) takes more energy than you get out of the ethanol. When cellulosic ethanol technology really gets cranked up perhaps it will be a resonable alternative (at least it won't increase the cost of corn to feed people around the world).

BioD is proven to use less energy to produce and is thus 'greener' than corn based ethanol.

check this out:
http://team.appsci.queensu.ca/documents/BiodieselTEAMReportforImperialOil.pdf

I personally think the biodiesel from algae concept is interesting (though I know nothing about it). It has the advantage of using CO2 (sourced from say a coal based power plant)

>> If this continues, you get two dollars for one Eu soon.

Lol. You already get about $2.06 for one UK pound. ucExactly 6 years ago it was $1.45.
It seems like Bush has fked your country's economy up badly.

The united states production capacity for food is approximately 1/4 the amount needed to feed the entire world at present. Our farmers represent 2% of our population. Currently, government subsidies allow these numbers by paying farmers to not grow crops, or to sell them at lower prices. Our cows eat food that's good enough for humans because it's just as cheap. If you think that we don't have the production capacity to create a major industry with Ethanol you're flat wrong.

And for those who are not very economics savvy, the dollar is not being reduced in value to the Euro because Bush messed up the economy. The EU has had a major spurt of economic growth, and our growth has been good, They've got 25% more poeple, and many of the economies of europe are still maturing, unlike our own.

Filtering factual statements through political opinions is a good way to make your opinion count for nothing. Keep them seperate and we can agree to disagree. Mix them together and you're just the person that everybody ignores when he/she talks.

This forum was supposed to be about Jay Leno's E85 'Vette but I rfeel I must react to other issues that have come up.

I'd say the war in Iraq is directly and indirectly a major factor behind the low growth in the US economy. A lot of govt dollars are going into it (and its consequences) and not being spent in more productive ares. That there so far has not been a quick fix to either the war itself or "global terrorism" is probably making the man in the street less willing to spend as well. Unwillingness to deal with antiquated production facilities does not fire the technological advancement sector of the economy. I wouldn't say Bush has fked anything, maybe he's just too naïve for the job or too rigid - clinging desperatley to ideas that don't work instead of trying new stuff. Well, he probably won't go down in history as one of the great presidents, lol.

The EU or rather, European economies as a whole, have historically had less growth than the US. "Many of the economies are still maturing, unlike our own" is an OK statement if you think of economies as countries - each one the same as the other - but put next to the sum of the mature and regulated economies of Great Britain, Germany (which is just leaving its 15 year slump from lifting East Germany out of it's post-communism misery), France, Italy, Spain, Benelux and Scandinavia the statement seems over-simplified.

Historically global periods of economic growth have not been possible without the US economy more or less leading the way. This last (current) one has been different in that the growth has been enormous despite the lack-lustre performance of the US economy. It seems the growth of China and India may have dissolved that rule of thumb.

On E85: in Sweden it costs about 70% of 95 octane gas and contains 70% of the energy so there is no up-(or down-)side in either price or energy content. I hear it's driving up the price of agricultural products though which means there will be less incentive to feed the rest of the world. As I recall from high school distillation is quite energy-costly but perhaps modern distillation processes have addressed that.

Anyway, what's wrong with fuel efficiency and building lightweight cars? Car manufacturers seem to have lost the ability. More than twenty years ago there were (European) full-size cars that weighed between 2700 and 3300 lbs with adequate engines and low aerodynamic drag. Nowadays much smaller cars weigh that much. Low-profile and wide tires in general have a higher rolling resistance than higher profile and narrower tires which means better economy.

I guess it's difficult to re-acquire lost knowledge. A barrel of oil is now close to $100, wow!

"If you think that we don't have the production capacity to create a major industry with Ethanol you're flat wrong."

No, we don't. I'm an Economics major and we discussed this in one of our classes the other day and it's something like if we turn every usable bit of land in the country into a corn field, we'd still only be able to supply less than 50% of our fuel needs. Now, you'll probably say "oh, but 45% is a huge number" - sure, but then where are you going to build anything else or get your food from?

@Remy LeBeau

Your statement may be true for the time being, but anytime you have an emergence of a new technology other industries have to follow suit for them to succeed. For ethanol to work as a mainstream fuel supply you would have to use something other than corn. That is why people are experimenting with fast growing grass that can grow taller than corn and be harvested with farming equipment already in use. Advances like this will be what makes or breaks ethanol use, so in the end it's not an economics problem it's an engineering problem.

"That is why people are experimenting with fast growing grass that can grow taller than corn and be harvested with farming equipment already in use. Advances like this will be what makes or breaks ethanol use, so in the end it's not an economics problem it's an engineering problem."

You're still not going to have the land to do it. If you bulldozed all of Africa and turned it into a giant *pick your type of plant* farm to use for Ethanol, then we'd have enough to power JUST the US with maybe a little extra. Does that even vaguely sound reasonable to you?

It isn't an economics or engineering issue (though the former can tell you how impractical it is and the latter can tell you how to make it slightly more efficient), it's a matter of space. There is only so much land to go around in the world and you need insane amounts of it to make a decent amount of ethanol.

I'd love to have a magic solution so we can tell OPEC to suck it, but there isn't really one...the best bet is bio-diesel because there's so many easy ways to make it, but even that probably isn't a complete solution.

To the guy who said that octane has nothing to do with power: I know. But higher compression does give more power, as well as more heat, so like you said you need higher octane. If you already have higher octane, might as well increase compression ratio. In the end, its more power.

Niz,

You might need to do some reading on how much the president influences the economy. Very little. I know bashing Bush is the thing to do, but if you are going to do it, do it intelligently. One other point, the price of one currency compared to another currency has is based on MUCH more than just the power of the economy. Just felt like pointing that out Niz.....

@ Carter

My comment wasn't to say that you can't produce enough corn to power a significant % of the autos. My comment was that it would (and currently is, according to the Economist magazine) pushing the price of corn up over the world. I would say it's a fact that if there are other uses for corn it's price will climb (maybe oil will drop too?). That's good for the farmer, I agree. It will be a problem for poorer countries. However, my real point was that the energy cost of producing ethanol from corn makes it a poor choice of feedstock. I can't figure out why people aren't using sugar beets since most of the worlds sugar is derived directly from them.

I can say I have seen an inkling of some of the lobbying groups in action when it came to producing BioD from canola in Canada. I would guess the corn farmers lobbies in the US have a similar influence. Politics and money are rarely separated. I'm not saying they should be, but the soybean farmers may not be quite as well organized or aware of the potential for bioD and the goldmine they're sitting on. They will soon, and the corn based ethanol will likely fad away as a non-solution to our energy problem.

@ others
As for Jay's car, calling a Corvette green is a little like saying the earth is standing still. It's all relative.

There's nothing really wrong with ethanol as a fuel, but let's not call it green. That's for politicians and suckers.

As for hydrogen, last time I checked, the cost to transport H2 was so excessively high (a lot of that is due to the practical limitations of how we compress H2) that it's not currently (stress currently) feasible for large scale automobile distribution. I can see a time where electrolysis cells can operated at very high pressures and the need for compression will be eliminated, but it sure isn't the case now. If you really want to make hydrogen, make it from Natural gas at your house and a small compressor. Not too 'green' though.

Though the environmental costs are high, the production of synthetic fuels from coal (and that could be methanol or ethanol, but conventional fuels are possible too) are common and technically possible with todays technology. The big companies in this are Sasol, but there's lots of R&D going on in the US and around the world.

Enough soapboxing for me :) It's interesting to see others opinions.

PS don't forget about the cellulosic ethanol. That one could really change things.

Dave,

Not only will corn prices climb, many other prices will climb. All the food products that use corn will inflate, and all the other crops that aren't produced as much will inflate. This in not good. We are already having with other crop prices rising because so many farmers switched over to corn production. So many switched in fact that corn prices fell for a while.

Consumers are going to feel the effects of using ethanol at the pumps, and at the grocery store. Really, this could stretch all the way through the economy.... we will see.

On a side note, the entire process of producing ethanol is currently pollutes more than if we were to just use petrol. Think about the fertilizer, tractors and other equipment, transportation, refinement..... transportation again. On and on....

Just to clarify, in the above posts I mentioned corn prices falling for a while, I should have said a while. It was for a short period of time in the market. They have since risen quite a bit.... over $3.50 a bushel.

Just to clarify, in the above posts I mentioned corn prices falling for a while, I shouldn't have said a while. It was for a short period of time in the market. They have since risen quite a bit.... over $3.50 a bushel.

you bitch and complain about 10% loss in mpg because of e85. how about the fact that it went from 427ci to 500ci. the zo6 was rated at something like 27mpg highway. for 73 ci increase and 95hp, he looses maybe less than 3 mpg. and thats not even taking into account maybe they gave it a taller final drive because of the increase in power.
when i jacked the power in my mustang, if i lost just 3 mpg compared to what i did, i would have been happy. but thats what i get for going from 4.6 to 5.0 and hitting 500 hp.