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Well I might as well throw my 2 cents into the ring. Here is what I have been messing with this fall on my 300 mile a week work commute.
My 94 Astro all stock would get 21mpg with easy driving and not going over 60 with E0. Easy meaning actually staying with the flow of traffic and not passing everyone all the time.
With a few mods I was regularly getting 23mpg. I can't remember what ones were done at the time but now this is my current list.
Electric fan, underdrive pullies, load range D LRR tires @65psi, tunerpro rt 5 with an apu1 emulator to do realtime tuning/monitoring of the engine, replace all sensors and hoses that were even remotely suspect, 1200 stall diesel converter(stock is 16-1800), Adjusted shift points and lockup to maximize mpg, and a front air dam.
The van blew it's transmission and I more or less parked it for a while since I had a horrible junkyard trans in it. While it was sitting last local station ended up going to E10. I was 90% riding my bike and it's mileage is all over the place and I really don't bother checking it anymore so I didn't notice.
When I put the new transmission/converter in after the van had been sitting for a few months and filled it up and got no better mileage. Actually over a few tanks it was worse. I think I ended up at 21.5mpg for 3 tank average. So with E10 that is what it has been consistently getting. The engine is also tuned as carefully as you could possibly get it. I have probably 50 hours of datalogging and very carefully setting up the computer to run as good as possible with E10. The best I can get is 23mpg without changing my driving style.
2 weeks ago I acquired a small supply of E0 and got the front air dam tore off during that trip. I stuck the stock tune back on the engine but kept the improved shift points and lockup settings and went at it. I had 1 gallon of mixed E10/E0 left so I figure it is all good. The first tank was 25mpg. The second will be empty this week if I drive that van every day. I have enough gas left in the barrel for one more tank after this one hopefully.
I can say that on my cars and most older cars I have messed with, it seems like 20-25% mileage drop with E10 is pretty consistent. I have no idea why Frank wants to be so blind to the obvious, but whatever. Maybe he has family in the corn farming business or something. But I figure a lot of it is that some people have been using ethanol mixed gas since the 80s without knowing and and now that the stickers are on the pump they see no difference and conclude it must not be any different than straight gas. Anyone who doubts it should get a pre 96 car and do some tests with known pure gas and E10 and it will be pretty obvious. It would be really helpful if the doubters would do some ABA testing to go along with everyone else instead of just ranting.
I will run through at least 3 more tanks of gas in that van before I rip the engine out of it and solve the ethanol problem for good by going to a 6.5L engine this coming spring. I might be able to get some useful results before then if all goes well and I don't modify it anymore.
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