tetrafuel

[gooeytek]

This morning before heading off to work, as usual, I am tuned in to one of my favourite programs "Beyond Tomorrow". This particular episode had a feature on Fiat's operations in Brazil, where they are making and selling a lot of their 'tetrafuel' cars. These cars are compact-sized 2 & 4-door models that run on 4 different types of fuel, in any ratio, automatically.

1) alcohol (plentiful in Brazil)
2) gasohol (somewhat like E85 here)
3) petrol (gasoline to us NA's)
4) Compressed Natural Gas

you can load up on any of these types of fuel at any of their fuel stations, depending on whichever is lowest in price I guess, and the car automatically programs itself to use whatever fuel is available in the gas tank, unless there is something in the Compressed natural Gas tanks (its first choice, being the cheapest).

What really caught my attention was that Fiat was building these in cooperation with Magneti Marelli, who holds the patent on the ECU that allows these cars to be ultra-flexible with the fuel it uses. Maybe we will see something like this stateside, if we can somehow get the infrastructure to provide these other alternative fuels.

some youtube clips (not in english though):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAaoZQ9o3_c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n75Bw...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tHSY...eature=related

[Electrofreak]

Pretty much the same as what we call FlexFuel here in the US. You might have noticed that little logo stamped on the backside of some cars. There are even some Dodge models that have the feature, (www.dodge.com/flexfuel), and we have a rather interesting debate going on in this thread about it: E85 Conversion???

Apparently some Brazilian cars actually have a small auxillary fuel tank for pure gasoline to assist starting in cold weather conditions where ethanol blends can have ignition issues. Sounds like a good idea for people like me who tend to drive 'til the fuel needle is buried in the red.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexfuel