Has anyone heard of any talk of making a flex fuel audi? That sure would be good with some of the turbo motors. You just can't beat 105 octane and save the US from our reliance on the middle east at the same time.

You are only half right about E-85. While you do get less MPG, you get MORE power. My wife has a 05 Chevy Suburban (her dream car for our family, dogs, toys, etc.) and we put E-85 in it. We normally get about 15mpg in mostly town drivnig with a lot of idling while running errands. With the E-85, we get about 11mpg doing the same driving etc. With E-85, you only use about 15% crude oil as compared with gasoline. You can convert existing engines to use it as well. Not sure about the details but, it is possible. The main thing about E-85 for us that makes it worth using is obviously using less crude in our beast but, also sticking it to the oil companies and helping out the farming economy.

I am currently working on obtaining MY dream car, an A8. My father-in-law just got a beautiful blue 2000 A8 and he let us use it for the weekend. My wife is sold on it now and I am shopping around!

Gallon for gallon E85 has less energy, however E85 allows you to run a much richer mixture resulting in much more power than gas (at the cost of reduced mileage). This isn't counting the added benefits of much higher octane rating and not making some goat herder stinking rich.

Quote:
only use about 15% crude oil as compared with gasoline


by itself this fact looks pretty good. We think "hey, I'm using less of the black gold, cool." but you should think about the whole story.

If you tally up the amount of oil used to truck the corn to the ethanol plant, produce the ethanol (very energy intensive) truck the solid wastes to cattle ranchers, and then truck the ethanol around (ethanol doesn't pipeline well) You're using more oil than you thought.