E10 Fuel, How Will It Affect Our Cars?

[e21Keith]

Plans are afoot to roll E10 fuel which will double the current Ethanol content from 5 to 10%.

There are the usual articles in the motoring press and the internet predicting issues for owners of Vauxhall Zafiras (as if owning a Zafira wasn't bad enough). There is little or no advice for owners of classic cars other than sweeping statements about costs to modify older vehicles to run on E10.

So my question is what do we have to think about, what's the practical advice, what do we need to change/upgrade (if anything)? As part of my restoration I replaced all the rubber pipes and fitted a new electric pump, but I haven't done anything to the metering unit or injectors.

[uwbuurman]

Over here in the Netherlands we have the same discussions. We have the0 since a cluple of months. It is chemically different than the e10 they have in Germany and Belgium, which are neigbouring countries. Lots of cars run worse, have higher fuel consumption and in some case just won't drive at all. So in my mind it is rubbish. Apart from the tax matter. We now pay the same amount of taxes on less oil based fuel, that won't get you the mileage that you've had.

[Jeroen]

Yup, and there is much more chance of corrosion due to a higher water content. I'm staying away from this rubbish, all cars I've tried on E10 only ran worse and also mpg figures suffered on top of these likely corrosion issues.

[e21Keith]

I've read that there is a very marginal increase in fuel consumption, maybe1-2%. It's the running and corrosion issues I'm more concerned about.

[Wilmo]

Corrosion risk is limited. It is only dangerous with superfresh petrol and completely sealed tanks, our tanks are kind of open so it will attract water, which is good. Between 0.2% and 10% water content it is not dangerous, added to that, in the aluminium parts of our cars is zink, which protects against the corrosion. The corrosion is only in very specific cases with high pressures and high temperatures combined with the extremely low or high water content.

Problems here have started since EU demands the petrol coming out of the pistol has maximum 0.3% water content. Suppliers have responded by decreasing moisture content significantly to fulfil this demand, and thus supplying petrol that is 'dry' and therefore potentially dangerous.

Ever since the eighties has petrol changed a lot. Today it is more aggressive and chemical complex, even without the ethanol. Therefore basic rules of fresh lines and seals still count, as is normal with maintenance. When in these days a line of a random Citroen C1 starts to leak due to non-existent maintenance it is of course caused by E10, while last year the same fault was because of the maintenance.

Of course is this statistics of low numbers, but 100% of the BMW's owned by me (which is about one E21) run on E10 for over six years with, errm, something like 70-80.000km. I have to say that it is mostly Swedish, Belgian and German E10. Dutch E10 however... I believe I experienced some different behaviour with this stuff as well.