A bit of history: Fiat 147, the first mass-produced ethanol car
Today, ethanol is not the most favored solution to oil dependency, but it was not always so frowned upon. Here's a car that deserves a place in the history of ethanol's growth. A Brazilian friend of mine pointed to me to the first mass-produced ethanol car (with the exception of the Ford T): the local version of the Fiat 127 (also the Seat 127) that was called the Fiat 147. The 147 was developed in Brazil in 1976 right as the oil crisis hit and the country was seeking solutions from the biofuel. Fiat finally launched the ethanol version of the 147 in 1979 after three years of testing. The 147 used a 1.3-liter 60hp powertrain, but the compression ratio was reduced to 10.65:1 so it could run on ethanol. Despite the 30 percent fuel increase, the car had better performance figures than the gasoline version and became a hit. This car was also released in a diesel version. Enjoy a couple of videos of the 147 after the jump. Muito obrigado, Pedro!
[Source: Best Cars Web Site]
This ad wanted to show how durable the car is:
And this one is my favorite: With 4 people inside, at normal road speeds, the car ran 12km over this bridge with 3/4l of gasoline. If I did the math correctly, that's 6.2 l/100km or 38 mpg US.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
JerseyGeoff 12:25PM (12/17/2008)
This proves that purpose built drivetrains for ethanol have fewer tradeoffs than we endure here with our E-85 etc dual fuel messes. You may wish to check that compression ratio factoid however. Due to the higher anti knock resistance of ethanol compared to usual road gasoline, Fiat probably INCREASED the compression ratio (as they could) to take best advantage. I read somewhere that if you were going to build an ethanol only drivetrain it would be small, high compression, and with aggressive turbocharging.
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Carney 4:16PM (12/17/2008)
It's definitely easier and cheaper to engineer alcohol ONLY cars, but unless you're going to have a very expensive, controversial Brazil style mandate that all gas stations have an alcohol pump, they're not going to be a practical alternative.
Also, E100 and M100 cars can have greater problems starting in cold weather. Mixing in a little gasoline helps avoid that.
Carney 12:15PM (12/17/2008)
Former NASA rocket and nuclear engineer Dr. Robert Zubrin's book "Energy Victory" tells a lot of fascinating stories, among them the story of Brazil's switch to ethanol. Being a dictatorship at the time, the President simply ordered all gas stations to supply an ethanol pump, ignoring the absence of ethanol cars. Of course this was hugely wasteful as pumps stood idle waiting for ethanol cars, which eventually did show up.
Today, since Flex Fuel technology was invented by Ford in the 1980s, such a waste and expense is no longer necessary. Flex Fuel only costs about $100 to add to a car, compared to the large sums it would cost to install an alcohol pump, or the gasoline profits a gas station owner would have to forgo from one of his pumps as the pump stood idle.
And yet if all new cars had to be Flex Fuel, then we'd have 50 million alcohol capable cars on the road in America just in 3 years, not counting the rest of the world. That's enough of a market so that gas station owners will be willing to undercut their rivals to sell cheaper ethanol or especially methanol.
Give the cars the capability, and the pumps will come on their own.
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Luke 4:48PM (12/17/2008)
Wasn't the Ford Model T the first massed-produced ethanol car?
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Kitko 6:24AM (12/18/2008)
it's all fine with ethanol but it drove prices of food skywards, even though its production is heavily subsidized.
Ethanol is marketed as something greener than oil derrived gas/petrol but it's real purpose is to ease oil dependancy and let the western world drive - while the countries growing crops for ethanol often starve.
So instead of comming up with smart solutions and technologies to power our cars, we're now using food to drive.
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Carney 3:04PM (12/18/2008)
This is completely untrue.
Read this page for more details.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/in-defense-of-biofuels
A few excerpts:
"In the last five years, despite the nearly threefold growth of the corn ethanol industry—actually, because of it—the amount of corn grown in the United States has vastly increased. The U.S. corn crop grew by 45 percent, the production of distillers grain (a high-value animal feed made from the protein saved from the corn used for ethanol) quadrupled, and the net U.S. corn production of food for humans and feed for animals increased 34 percent.
Contrary to claims that farmers have cut other crops to grow more corn, U.S. soybean plantings this year are expected to be up 18 percent and wheat plantings up 6 percent. U.S. farm exports are up 23 percent over last year. America is clearly doing its share in feeding the world. [...]
[...T]here are roughly 2,250 million acres of land in the continental United States. About 1,600 million of those acres are arable. Roughly half of that land (800 million acres) is farmland, but only about a third of that (280 million acres) is actually being cultivated. Only about 85 million of those farm acres are presently growing corn, and just a fifth of that land—about 17 million acres—is growing corn that becomes ethanol. In short, there is plenty of farmland in the United States that could be used to grow more corn—or more of the other staple crops needed to meet domestic or international demand. Even more importantly, agricultural technology is constantly advancing. U.S. corn yields per acre have risen 17 percent since 2002, and the state of Iowa alone today produces more corn than the entire nation did in the 1940s. Applied globally, such improved techniques can multiply world agricultural yields many times. In fact, they have risen by a factor of six since 1930—which is why, even though the world’s population has tripled since that time, there is a lot more food for everyone today.
[...]
[T]he two primary reasons for higher food prices are, first, higher demand, and second, higher fuel prices. The increased global demand for food ought to be seen as a very good thing: it represents hundreds of millions of people, especially in China and India, rising out of poverty and moving to more calorie-rich diets. Escalating fuel prices, however, are not good news: they drive up the cost of everything we eat. For example, consider the $3 box of cornflakes you might see in your grocery store. Farm commodity prices basically have a trivial effect on its price. A bushel of corn contains 56 pounds of grain, so at the current “very high” commodity price of $5 per bushel, a pound of corn costs 9 cents. So the 16 ounces of corn in that cereal box cost a total of 9 cents when bought from the farmer. But when the price of oil goes up, that increases the cost of production, transport, wages, and packaging—all driving up the retail cost of food.
And, in this regard, biofuels have already done more good than harm to the world’s poor. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Global production of biofuels is rising annually by the equivalent of about 300,000 barrels of oil a day. That goes a long way toward meeting the growing demand for oil, which last year rose by about 900,000 barrels a day.” The paper cites a Merrill Lynch analyst who “says that oil and gasoline prices would be about 15 percent higher if biofuel producers weren’t increasing their output.” So even though the world’s biofuels industry is still just aborning, it has already begun to bring down oil prices."
Carney 3:10PM (12/18/2008)
If even that short amount of text made your eyes glaze over (it looks like more because of the skinny paragraphs Blogsmith shoehorns comment text into), then just focus on this:
"In the last five years, despite the nearly threefold growth of the corn ethanol industry [...] the net U.S. corn production of food for humans and feed for animals increased 34 percent."
OK? So, proof, by the cold hard numbers, that biofuel production has NOT reduced food supply and thus cause higher food prices. Plenty of other info at the link too, about rice going up as well (despite not being used for biofuel) etc.
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