While I've always agreed that hybrids are not as cost-effective as many people think they are - I find the extreme findings of that study to be suspicious. I'd honestly like to know who funded that 'study' and what their exact formula and derivation was for their numbers.

 

http://www.hybridcars.com/south-park-hybrid-smug.html

 

http://www.cnwmr.com/

 

It's funny that people feel compelled to have hybrid owners "justify" their purchase, but there aren't many surveys showing that most heavy duty pickup owners never get their money's worth out of buying all that towing/hauling capacity.

 

I've oft wondered that myself, WERM.

I'm betting that if we looked at their calcs, most of the development work is fully amortized into the existing base of hybrids. This would skew the numbers WAY up.
If they built the life cycle cost of a nation fully equipped with hybrid tech, consuming 20% less fuel than they currently do, how would the numbers look then?
If they run the numbers with ultra-caps in place of batteries, how do the numbers start looking?
If they run these same scenarios ten years ahead, how do they look?

New technology, by definition, cannot be fully mature and fully cost-reduced out of the gate. I remember when people poo-poo'd PCs, too.

 

 

Wasn't the first hybrid car produced almost 110 years ago, just a little after the internal combustion engine was beginning to be used in automobiles?

 

To me it shows why GM's & Pres. Bush's push for E85 makes a TON more sense.

 

Proliferation of E85 will show why fuel-saving hybrid development is so critical.

We waste too much fuel idling, sitting in traffic, etc. Hybrid goes a long way to fixing that. It's far from perfect at this point- but so is any tech that's not fully matured. And maturity must happen in the marketplace, not in the lab.

 

What if a hybrid could run on E85? It wouldn't be hard to do...

 

What are the advantages of E85 over biodiesel, and vice-versa?

 

That would be the icing on the cake to allow us to tell the morons in the ME to eat their oil....

 

E85 is for gasoline powered cars and biodiesel is for, well, diesels....but both don't really need petroleum, so bring it on.

Indiana is building the world's largest Bio-diesel plant and 9 E85 refineries!

 

I'm nearly certain that the upcoming Tahoe two-mode hybrid will have a flex fuel program in the ECM.
Aside from that, basically all cars can run on E85. They are a little less efficient (not much, just slightly) than cars with a flex fuel program tune in the ECM. In fact, the current crop of small hybrids run really high CRs (11.3:1 in the older Civic, 10.8:1 in the new, and 13:1 in the Prius), so they would likely run fine on E85.

 

Your information is skewed. It isn't just the PCM that is different. Much of the fuel system needs to be changed, because e85 is likely to corrode much of the components in it after a decent duration has passed (for example, the aluminum in the system won't much like the ethanol). You could probably run e85 for a little while, but any length of time and you are going to start experiences problems.

I don't know why you think high compression engines making running e85 ok. E85's 105 octane rating is going to help a high compression engine to avoid detonation, but all of the cars you have mentioned are "green" cars, meaning they are build around getting the most gas mileage and cleanest burn as possible. They can run those high compressions on gas because they run such a small bore that the flame front travel can better be controlled the way the engineers desire it, and with better flame front control comes less detonation, and better tailpipe emissions. Higher compression engines also get better gas mileage than lower compression engines. None of this has anything to do specifically with e85 though.