Originally Posted by SRTFreak
I kept noticing that my mileage was going up and down from gas station to station. I asked my stepdad who runs a BP ( Amoco ) here in North Carolina about this. In NC the stations can mix up to 10% ethanol with the gas and they do not have to post this to the customers.
I ran into someone else who let another person drive their car and they decided not to buy one due to the gas mileage. When he heard of this he took the car into MB to see why he had a mpg drop they said to try a Shell gas station and his mileage went back up. The percentage of ethanol varies from station to station and sometime the same brand of station may or may not have it.
The evidence so far on this story is that ethanol will reduce milage as it carries less energy per gallon.
I am visiting my brother-in-law here in IOWA, the heart and soul of corn country. Perhaps they are biased but his wife claims almost 2 MPG increase in her Mercury Marquis with ethanol on a recent 550 mile trip.
I have not had the same results in any of my cars. Perhaps it is different in different engines.
To validate your friends experience, I have tested Shell on seven separate 1,100 mile trips from St Louis to Hartford CT and found 10% to 14% improvements with Shell vrs BP or other fuels with Ethanol. Hardly scientific but reasonably believable.
There are several threads from March and May of this year discussing this. Check out "end the ethanol scam" in the politics section and search "ethanol."
In the Coupe section look at " how many miles per gallon?"
Kurts, Maxwell and others have some good stuff there.
roadster with a stick