Can I use E85?

[Dside11-11]

In a 2004 Tacoma V6? I tried to read the Wikipedia thingy on it, and it started to go over my head. In non-grease-monkey terms - Why can I and Why can i not use this? Are there inexpensive mods i can get to make it non-harmful? The shit is only $1.99 a gallon in Denver. That would ease the crunch.

Edit: Did a search and found a lot more political and environmental pros/cons to it than technical. All I want to know is will this fuck up my relatively new and expensive(for me) truck?

[mnflyfish]

In a 2004 Tacoma V6? I tried to read the Wikipedia thingy on it, and it started to go over my head. In non-grease-monkey terms - Why can I and Why can i not use this? Are there inexpensive mods i can get to make it non-harmful? The shit is only $1.99 a gallon in Denver. That would ease the crunch.

Edit: Did a search and found a lot more political and environmental pros/cons to it than technical. All I want to know is will this fuck up my relatively new and expensive(for me) truck?

E85 is a huge deal right now here in the corn belt. It's very simple, if your owners manual says you can then you can. If it doesn't mention it then you can't. You could verify with Toyota but I don't believe they have an E85 compatable truck yet.

As for conversion kits, it's about $2000. Our Gov, it's an election year, is trying to lobby the Feds to let Minnesota be a test state for conversion kits and asking for tax incentives for Minnesotans in order to buy the conversion kits.

Frankly it would take a lot of driving to pay for the $2000 kit. E85 decreases your mileage by about 30%, then do a bunch of complicated math stuff, and you'll find you need to do a ton of driving to make it pay for the conversion.

Good Luck,
Jay

[pechelman]

e85 requires a different AFR.
Gasoline being somewhere around 15 and E85 somewhere around 30.
Additionally, E85 is extremely corrosive to aluminum.
It also burns colder and can produce more power.
Fuel efficiency wise, i forget off hand what our injector duty cycles were over the course of a race using e85 vs 105octane.

Also worth mentioning is that e85 burns with a cool blue flame. If it was pure ethanol, and it burned, youd see no flame.

But yea, check out the manual to see if you can use it.

[summit]

E85 has better accel.

If you accidently filled your car with E85 a few times, it won't destroy it. Do not use it regularly unless you have a flex fuel or converted car.