I own 2 mowers over 20 years old and a generator that’s 10 years old and a snow blower that’s 15 years old - and it’s NEVER EVER happened to me. I run them dry at end of season. I’ve never used a gas stabilizer.
One thing I find very telling is how short the list of current flex fuel vehicles is.*
What do the car manufacturers know that the rest of us don’t? I think they know that the “flex fuel” feature only sells to people who live in corn country, to the gullible, and to the paranoid.
I see flex fuel vehicles here in NH every day. Mainly Ford and GM pickups. We don’t have a single E85 station in NH.
I have a flex fuel Audi A4. Nowhere on the outside of the vehicle identifies it as such. Inside the fuel filler door it does. Local pumps have E10, E20, E0 and a few, E85.
Have you done the math to see if E20 is worth the discount? I’m betting E85 isn’t worth the discount considering it would have to be about 1/3 the cost of E10 to be worth it.
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E85 was often not worth the discount even when that 49.5 cent/gallon blend tax credit was in effect.
At first glance math-in-my-head E20 is not worth using. Same for E85 The loss in fuel economy calculation is way more than math in my head and I’d have to confirm with real world mpgs, anyway.
There is only a couple of reasons I’d consider filing up with E20 or E85, for that matter. 1) Because it is such a good solvent, maybe run a tank through as a fuel system cleaner.
Or 2) E20 as fuel for my Mustang - not a flex fuel vehicle - as additional engine cooling for track fun. The richer mixture adds cooling when the engine is run hard. The fuel pump and injectors are up to the job, from what I’ve read. The question is if the additional 10% would have a great enough effect.
Generally the math doesn’t add up and I don’t know why E20 customers ARE E20 customers!
Because they look at the prices on the gas pump and go for the cheapest one.
It’s the same reason my otherwise very intelligent father (as a lawyer and an engineer, we always said he was 2/3rds of a joke) would drive all over town looking for 5 cents a pound less on beef. Even though he intellectually knew he was spending at least what he saved on gas, he was compelled to do it because people gravitate to a lower price tag.
That’s why so many things are $X.99. There’s no practical difference between $4.99 and $5.00, but you’ll move product a lot faster if you take that one cent off.
People go for the low price without considering what that low price will cost them. It’s why they buy E20/E85. It’s why the Chevy Cavalier was way more popular than such a crappy car ever should have been. Heck, it’s why they shop at Walmart.
Because math is hard?? 
Yeah, you are probably correct. To most people gas-is-gas. No one really looks much farther than price. That seems to be the motivation for the “Do I really need premium gas??” postings. Doesn’t explain the “I pumped diesel into my gas car!” folks. That’s just a whole 'nother issue!
C’mon, now, you came up with the 3rd part of that joke, didn’t you? 
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My Ranger is Flex-fuel and I’ve only filled up with it once, intending to keep up with the mileage to satisfy my curiosity but my brother borrowed the truck to drive 10 miles and filled it up before returning it. I didn’t recognize any difference in performance but I don’t need much performance.
I wouldn’t expect you’d notice much in normal driving. Maybe the ECU pushes the part throttle spark advance up a bit more to help recover the mpg losses. Not sure if that would be across the spark-map to full-throttle, higher rpm stuff and I am pretty sure you’d still record lower mpgs on E85 than E10.
Local racers and track-day drivers like E85 because the engine generally runs much cooler on the air/fuel ratio of 9.4:1 of E85. Turbo and supercharged cars benefit even more - like adding a bigger intercooler.
If the car has enough fuel pump and injectors, some tuners can create a “tune” to make it possible to run 1/3 mix of E85 to E10 without setting any error codes. Adds a bit of octane, lowers the A/F ratio and helps cooling.
That reminds me of when I was in elementary school, and someone would ask in math class, “Why can’t we just do this on a calculator?”
The teacher would answer, “What happens if you don’t have a calculator with you?”
These days it’s pretty ironic that most of us walk around with more computing power in our pockets than NASA had for the moon landing. If I turn my phone from portrait to landscape orientation, the Apple calculator app turns from a basic calculator into a scientific calculator.
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No, I don’t think human intelligence is on the rise or on the decline. I think it’s all just a matter of perspective.
A scientific calculator isn’t an advantage unless you know how to use it. When I took Elementary Statistics, being able to use a TI-83 Plus graphing calculator didn’t mean I didn’t have to understand the concepts.
A calculator is just a tool, and I’d never suggest using a better tool (like a pneumatic ratchet and sockets over a set of box wrenches), makes the user any dumber.
Personally I’d rather see people taught how to think than taught how to do. If you know how to think, you can figure out or educate yourself on how to do.
I think a lot of the questions we answer on here where mechanics are obviously just throwing parts at a problem they don’t know the cause of would go away if those mechanics were better at thinking.
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Is it possible to learn how to use the sin, cos, and tan functions on a scientific calculator without understanding the concepts behind them?
Thank you for bringing this back to cars.
When it comes to troubleshooting, you’re absolutely right. It helps to have a good brain, and these days, anyone who is halfway intelligent is being pressured to go to college rather than enter a trade. The smart thing to do would be to give career advice based on aptitude and personality rather than IQ score, and send the students who do well in an academic environment to college, but send the intelligent young people who squirm in their seats in a classroom environment because they’re bored and would prefer to work with their hands to trade school. This is one reason getting rid of shop class is in high school is such a tragedy.
This reminds me of the movie The Breakfast Club.
BRIAN
See we had this assignment,
to make this ceramic elephant, and
um...and we had eight weeks to do
it and we're s'posed ta, and it was
like a lamp, and when you pull the
trunk the light was s'posed to go
on...my light didn't go on, I got a
F on it. Never got a F in my life...
When I signed up, you know, for the
course I mean. I thought I was
playing it real smart, you know.
'Cause I thought, I'll take shop,
it'll be such an easy way to
maintain my grade point average...
BENDER
Why'd you think it'd be easy?
BRIAN
Have you seen some of the dopes that
take shop?
BENDER
I take shop...you must be a ####in'
idiot!
BRIAN
I'm a ####in' idiot because I can't
make a lamp?
BENDER
No, you're a genius because you
can't make a lamp...
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No, but it’s possible to understand the concepts behind them if you know how to think and you start looking to educate yourself (which can include finding someone who already understands it to teach you).
Put another way, back in grade school when they had us doing square roots by hand (cripes, never again!), they taught us step by step how to do it. But they didn’t teach us why we were doing the steps. As a result, we came out of it able to do square roots by hand by following a list of memorized instructions, but we weren’t any better off than if we’d just hit the sqrrt button on the calculator. In neither procedure did we know what was happening.
If on the other hand they’d spent time explaining how to think about math, then we might have been more engaged when learning to do math. Heck, Feynman was rather famous for having taught himself calculus. I don’t mean reading a book on calculus. I mean inventing calculus all over again for himself by thinking about what he already understood about math. He had his own symbols for it and everything, which got him in trouble when he took a real calculus class because his teacher didn’t know what he was scribbling.
Now yes, he was a very smart guy, but there are lots of people out there as smart as him who don’t do things like that. But one difference was that from a very early age, his dad had made a point to teach him how to think and how to be curious about the world.
It’s why I get annoyed when my sister in law solves puzzles for my young nephew. Don’t do that! All you’re teaching him is “don’t do anything for yourself and don’t do any thinking if you don’t have to.” Let him solve it by himself, and if he comes to you for help teach him how to think about problems rather than just doling out the answer.
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I’ve been very fortunate to receive a liberal arts education with a big focus on critical thinking, so you and I definitely agree students should be taught how to think, not what to think. I’ve seen what happens to students who, because they were home schooled or attended junior college, came to a university honors program without a foundation in critical thinking, and it isn’t pretty. In a biology class, they’re good at wrote memorization, but they’re not particularly good at applying the knowledge they’ve memorized.
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