Dear Tim:
Get off of it. A 5 minute drive anywhere is not a commute. Its a drive in the neighborhood. You commute to other cities, suburbs or towns. By your definition, merely opening a laptop and working in your easy chair would be a commute. And that is patently absurd! At least the Census termed it travel time. They didn't say commute time.
Notice I lead with "Unless methanol gives much worse gas mileage your list doesn't seem very accurate." So asserting, or even proving that methanol gives worse gas mileage doesn't make me wrong.
I know ethanol has a lower energy density. OTOH it allows for a higher compression ratio and has other advantages, that make up for at least some of those differences. I've seen claims of gas mileage that was no worse than gasoline. I'm not really I haven't seen a really large scale controlled study, so I'm mainly going by anecdotal evidence. I'm not sure if its accurate or not.
I had less information about methanol.
You lied when you said and I quote "A 130 HP car might get 37mpg, a 260 HP SUV might get 13 mpg, but they aren't the same vehicle with different engines."
I said the exact same car and engine with the fuel system and EEC modified to handle all of those fuels. There isn't any SUV in there.
Besides, when and if you got 298HP from your SUV, you would not be getting 20MPG. You would be using some 20-25 gals/hr. You don't go 400-500MPH in your SUV then except perhaps in your dreams.
Those vehicles that get nearly the same mileage (-5 to -15%) on E85 as gasoline use turbochargers and such. They have the vehicle run at a higher efficiency points and run more lean than they do on gasoline.
You get higher power from gasoline by running it rich (and it fires the catalytic system faster). It is also used to stop knock along with retarding the timings. When you run E85 with an octane rating of 100, it allows higher compressions, leaner mixtures and timing advances without producing knock both of which increase thermal efficiency. Now a normal aspierated engine doesn't allow much change in compression, but the latter two effects can help mitigate MPG losses.
Turbocharged engines see more exhaust per energy released. This causes the turbine to spin faster and boost intake pressure. Since ethanol also has lower mean effective brake pressure, you can have more boost without causing increased wear in the engine. Thus wastegating (allowing some exhaust to bypass the turbine), if any, can be reduced. All of this allows more air and increases the effective compression ratio and efficiency. There is still MPG loss at the higher ratios like winter E85 (70% ethanol, 30% gasoline) and summer E85 (85%/15%). But it isn't as bad as the energy ratio.
There is one bad thing, E100 and to a lesser extent E85 is more hard to start an engine at cold temperatures. This is why they drop the percentage in winter in the colder climates. One major positive is that E85 sells for 30-40% less than gasoline (at least where the station doesn't try to gouge you). There is two reasons for this, ethanol isn't charged federal (and in most states) gas taxes. Here in Wisconsin, that means about 53 cents a gallon. And there is a producer tax credit as well. If completely passed on, that would be another 35-45 cents a gallon. In Wautoma, E85 is sold for $1.79 while E0 (pure gasoline, no RFG) is sold for $2.59. At those prices, you get 45% more E85 for the same price as gasoline. So if you get less than a 30-40% drop off on E85, its in your benefit to run E85.
The thing is that while most modern vehicles can run at higher ratios than E10 (Minnesota is considering requiring at least 20 ethanol in gas, E20), going much above 30-40% causes too much oxygen in the exhaust. This is because your EEC computer can't inject enough fuel into the engine. This causes the "check engine light" to go on. There is an easy fix for that, add a few gallons of E0 or E10 into the tank. The light should extinguish.
The more expensive fix is to increase the size of the fuel injectors and likely that would require your fuel pump to be upgraded as well. Furthermore, your fuel filter may become plugged, if yu have a dirty fuel system as the high ethanol content cleans out the contaniments from you tank and fuel line. You might also have to get a E85 profile for your EEC. The costs of the above are $100 to $800 depending on how many fuel injectors you need, the fuel pump, filter, profile and labor (the higher end, if you have someone else do it and you have a hard to get to V10 with 10 injectors).
But if you get only 20MPG highway, on E85 you get 16MPG (-20%) and you drive 15K miles on the highway. You use 750 gallons of $2.59 E0 for $1942.50 or 937.5 gallons of $1.79 E85 for $1,678.13 for an annual savings of $264.37. Even at the higher $800, you would pay it off in 3 years. You would have about a 350HP SUV probably shaving a second or two off your 0-60 times.
I said for any metro area. That includes all commutes in the metro area. You can't cherry pick part of them, and then say when you look at just this part, then the commutes might not be an extreme outlier.
Its no different what you do. You want to add in those that go 10 feet downstairs into your commute base. So you want to include everyone. Taking your approach, you would add in people who dust crops, fighter pilots and people who jump once a year into average ground delays at airports for air travelers to say that a 1 hour delay is an outlier.
"In the case of normally distributed data, using the above definitions, only about 1 in 150 observations will be a mild outlier, and only about 1 in 425,000 an extreme outlier." en.wikipedia.org
By your tone, you think 2.8 hours is an extreme outlier. By the above definition, if there are more than 30 people in the LA area who commute 2.8 hours, then it isn't an outlier. More than 15 in the SF Bay area. Well Hector Ruiz is a commuter into the Bay area since he has offices in Sunnyvale. It takes him far more than 2.8 hours to commute from Austin, TX to Sunnyvale, CA. Are you so sure I can't find 15 people in SF area or 30 in each of LA, Chicago or NYC? Dropping it to those who travel more than 6 miles likely drops that to 2-3 people in the SF area or 5-6 in LA, Chicago or NYC. We likely could add Dirk Meyer, Phil Hester and Dave Orton to Hector and we are above 3 in the bay area from just one company! So 2.8hrs isn't an outlier.
Pete |
