Pandamonkey

As I was driving to work yesterday I took note of the price of fuel.
Then I noticed the price of propane, it's similar to what we used to pay for gas.
Could our cars run on propane? I know that the tank would be a lot heavier.
GM tried to fit propane on some their small blocks in trucks in the 80's........with limited success.
Has anyone every heard of this?
I know the cost of the install would be astonomical though.

ollie-99

man i wish that would be cool.

when i went to visit some relatives in europe this guy had a bmw and could switch from propane to gas

silicuda

ollie where in europe did you go?

Pandamonkey

I found some sites that have some interesting reads.
LPG

TopSpeedZ28

A buddy of mine here on the Island has a 72ish GM pickup with a slightly beefed 402 in it. He has the dual mode system; a switch in the truck let's him go from propane to fuel at will. It's pretty cool! Must be possible, one would imagine. I do know his system was mega-bucks though....

ollie-99

i went to the good old country of Poland
all he did was push a switch and the propane/gas went on
U can totally feel the power once it went back to gas

bzeilstr

Propane has the luxury or reacting like a 105 Octane fuel but a litre or propane is not the equivalent of a litre of gasoline. A litre of propane will take you a lesser distance than the equivalent in gasoline. As you guessed, the conversion is the rub. Generally quite expensive I would venture to say that with our hatchback style vehicles preventing trunk storage of the tanks, it would be too expensive to ever really recover the cost of installation. I should mention at this point that the present cost of propane may be illusive. As a derivative of crude oil in the refining process, it will obviously be inflated at some point, as the cost of crude has been. As a sub category of natural gas..... well that just went up too. It really is no more attractive to the consumer than it was 5 years ago.

bunker

Yes LT1's can run on Propane, lots of those Taxi cabs are LT1's with propane & even natural gas, even OBDII LT1's can do it why not.

Black Robe

Without a blower/turbo added, an engine running on ANY compressed gas will never be able to make the same power as one that is running on a liquid fuel. Volumetric efficiency suffers because the expansion of the fuel to vapour has already been done OUTSIDE the engine's cylinders with LNG, propane, but with gasoline (diesel too) the fuel expands from liquid state to vapour inside the engine, leaving more volume for air to enter with it. This is why a taxi Caprice is a dog, even with an LT1.

Pandamonkey

In that case I guess I'll just have to add a nice ATI S/C too!

I wish........

sleepybu

there's no point of putting lpg on a car unless your going to take advantage of the high octane...you can make 600+ streetable hp on lpg