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Originally Posted by SDMCF
Could you give more info about the auxiliary tanks? Did the driver have to manually select the auxiliary tank when starting from cold, then switch back when the engine was warm? Or was it automated somehow?
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The auxiliary tanks were quite small, some didn't even hold an entire litre of gasoline, and were fitted under the hood. I have pictures of the engine bay of an early Dacia Logan showing clearly the auxiliary cold-start tank, gonna find them and try to upload here. Older dedicated-ethanol cars still fitted with a carburettor-fed engine had the gasoline tank selected manually enabling the gasoline to mix inside the carburettor bowl with whatever remaining alcohol from previous driving, but when EFI came around it was possible to start only with gasoline. Later on, I don't remember clearly when, it became common for the gasoline inside the auxiliary tank to get automatically injected at an ambient temperature which may vary according to each model, as long as there was gasoline on the auxiliary tank which many people didn't even bother to fill up. Around 2010 to 2011 the electric heating of the injectors to enable a quicker vaporizing of ethanol started to become mainstream on Brazilian flexfuel cars.
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This reminds me that Jaguars used to have twin tanks with a dashboard switch to select which one to use.
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A similar setup was fitted to 4WD versions of the Ford Pampa coupé-utility.
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Is there any milage (pardon the pun) in adopting that approach as a mod? Perhaps use one grade of fuel for starting or faster driving and a cheaper grade fuel for easy cruising. Has anyone done anything like that?
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AFAIK only some tractors and a handful of Swedish cars from the '80s (mostly a Saab model which I don't remember exactly) meant to operate with kerosene relied on a dual-tank setup for starting with gasoline until the engine temperature became safe to turn to kerosene.