Gasahol for your Celica, In your state Options

[Shigexile]

Kind of off-topic but stay with me here.

I'm researching the alcohol level of gasoline in every state.
In Illinois, its E10 (well... UP to 10% ethanol) or E85.

For Toyota, majority of the cars from 1987 will operate on E10 but Minnesota is pushing the E15 mandate which E15 is not recommended to cars prior to 2001 ---> 6th gen Celica.

I want to ask the local guys in every state, what is your gas fuel regulations or laws?
I know Florida, Minnesota, Hawaii, Missouri, Iowa, Montana, Kansas, Oregon, Louisiana, Washington, and Maryland MUST have 10% ethanol in their gas.
Other states are up to 10% but never over (besides E85).

If your state (MN people especially) has E15 and up gas or blender pumps, do you see any symptoms with the celica using the high alcohol content fuel?
I got lot of information off the internet but no definite data of each state and their fuel regulations for 2011. (Found 2007 but that data is too old to use now)

What about you 6gc'ers in Brazil? I believe the gas over there is like E20~E25. What kind of gas do you put in your 6gc?

Sorry, its for work but it got me curious on how it will affect the celica.
I'm not expecting much of you to answer this for me but I thought it won't hurt to ask.

Thanks in advance,
Shigs

This post has been edited by Shigexile: Jan 26, 2012 - 2:27 PM

[ricochet1490]

I'm glad you're open to a couple points of view. I also try to be open but my experience tells me that the ethanol isn't as bad as might be anticipated.

When I was working at honda, summer '11 and fall-winter '10, I was putting blends of E85 in my car regularly.

Using the winter time experience because that's when it'll make a bigger difference....

I would take the car down to about 2gal in the tank, put in 6-8 gal of E85, then top the rest off with E10(standard pump gas 87 oct. they had)
The car has about a 16 gal tank, so I was about 35% ethanol when I started. At that blend I never noticed any discernible change in start time or anything. I would increase the the E85 by about .5 gal every week/fill up. I got to where I was running about 9-9.5 gal of E-85 which is about 50% ethanol. As it got colder, and as I hit that percentage I would notice the car would have quite the rough idle sometimes and I had to "clean out the injectors" lol with a good rev to get it to run right. But that was only when the motor was cold and it never affected highway driving

Now I might have been trying to train the ECU too fast, the learning curve may have been too great for it as mine is only a 94 so I don't have all the extra oxygen sensors to give the ecu emissions information. That's where I noticed it start to struggle though. This was into about the 3rd week of october around Lima ohio.

I ended up hitting a deer the first week of november and drove a nissan maxima until christmas when I finished up my work there so my data for my celica didn't make it into really cold weather. I did the same thing with the maxima though for the next month or two. It's was/is a 2000 with 234,xxx on it at the time. It ran fine on 7-8 gal in a 20 gal tank through the cold.
The only time I figured I pushed it too far was I got to talking while pumping one day and put nearly 13 gal of E85 in the tank and it struggled a bit on the start up. Ran fine on the interstate. But I drove it to work and back for two days and then re-topped it off with pump gas and it ran fine after that.

So from my experience, without any modifications or a whole lot of ecu training time you can safely run E20-E50 without too much trouble. But again, that's just my experience.

*disclaimer*
While running the Maxima in that 2 month time frame, I had to replace the Idle air control valve.
I don't know if E85 had anything to do with it or not, but I was clocking 236,000 miles by that point, so it's hard to tell what was due to fail or IF the E85 had anything at all to do with that. I can't imagine it did, but who knows.

This post has been edited by ricochet1490: Jan 28, 2012 - 4:04 PM