FLEX FUEL

SWITCHING FROM GASOLINE TO E85 (AND BACK) HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER

- Tommy Lee Byrd

The case for ethanol-enriched fuel has been highly contested within the car community. Some people love E85, and some people wish that 100-percent gasoline was still the norm. The corn-based fuel component offers several advantages, such as a much higher octane rating, but the tuning aspect has frightened a lot of folks away from making the switch. Ryan Truax experienced this firsthand. He converted his car to E85 and went through the process of a custom tune, only to find that the car was inconsistent. Sometimes it would be rich, and sometimes it would be lean, so he dug a little deeper and found that the fuel from his local E85 pump did not always have the same ethanol content. This discovery led him to create Advanced Fuel Dynamics, a Texas-based company that builds plug-and-play flex-fuel conversions. The heart of the system is the Commander module, which, in combination with a GM Flex Fuel sensor, tells the injectors how much fuel to provide, based on the amount of ethanol detected in the fuel system in real-time. The Commander features infinitely adaptive ethanol tuning maps, so it can tune for any blend of gasoline and ethanol, and with the ProFlex Connect app, you can view your real-time ethanol mixture as you’re driving down the road.

With dyno testing, Advanced Fuel Dynamics has seen the most gains from 80-percent-or-higher ethanol content, but the Commander system adds power even when the ethanol content is less than 50 percent. Horsepower gains can be even more dramatic on boosted applications, as long as your fuel injectors are up to the task. Fuel mileage is also affected by ethanol content. Typically, a vehicle will see reduced fuel economy when running E85, but the trade-off is that E85 is less expensive than most 93-octane pump gas.