The cars have been manufactured since the 1980s, and there are numerous types of FFVs available on the market today. In fact, some people are probably driving a flexible fuel vehicle and may not even realize it. If you want to see if your car is indeed an FFV, just look on the car's gas cap door for a sticker or have a look in the owner manual.
If a FFV is run on E85, there is no loss of performance. But since a gallon of ethanol has less energy than gas, they will generally drive about 20 to 30 per cent fewer miles per gallon on E85. The engines are able to burn any proportion of the fuel blend in the combustion chamber. This is possible because fuel injection and spark timing are automatically adjusted according to the actual blend which is read by electronic sensors. These vehicles are different from bi-fuel autos as those cars store the two fuels in separate tanks and their engines operate on one fuel at a time.
There are about around 19 million FFV cars and light duty trucks on the roads of the world at the moment. Most of the vehicles are driven in Brazil, America, Canada, and Europe. Most of those are ethanol autos, but methanol FFVs also exist. Other types of fuels are also being tested in FFVs. Most of the leading car makers in the world produce some type of FFV.
The technology exists which will let an ethanol FFV to operate on any mixture of gas and ethanol, from pure gas up to pure ethanol. However, most of them are run on a maximum blend of 15 per cent gas and 85 per cent ethanol. The reason for this is to help reduce ethanol emissions at low temperatures as well as avoiding starting problems in cold weather.
While this technology may sound quite new to most people, the fact is it is been around for years. The first commercial FFV was actually the Ford Model T, which was manufactured from 1908 through 1927. The car had a carburetor with that allowed it to run on gas, ethanol, and a combination of both. The cars fell by the wayside once oil prices made gas a cheaper fuel to buy than ethanol.
But when the oil crisis hit in the early 1970s, alternative fuel vehicles started to become a reality again as they were researched and developed at a steady rate in America. The FFV is very popular in Brazil and it seems the government there is focused on further improvements to the cars and more research and development in the field of the ethanol FFV. They are also becoming more popular in America and the rest of the world as the vehicles give off less emissions and pollution than conventional cars.
The future definitely looks bright for the flexible fuel vehicle as more and more models are being developed and sold on a yearly basis.