Students Driving Cross Country On E85
In case you’ve wondered if you can drive across the U. S. on E85 fuel only the answer is “you can.” Some college students are doing just that as I write. I just spoke with Jim Richardson, Iowa Central Community College, and they’ll wind up in Des Moines tonight after starting out in Washington, DC yesterday morning. He said they had just done a few laps around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway!
I invited Jim to have the students send in daily reports to DomesticFuel that we can use here. I think it would be interesting to see their perspective on the trip and renewable fuels like ethanol. He thinks that after they get in tonight they can send us a report.
Here’s some more information about the trip they’re on:
Beginning on Monday, March 6, 2006, students from the Iowa Central Community College (ICCC) will begin a cross-country trip in a 2005 Chevrolet Avalanche with E85 FlexFuel capability, demonstrating the possibility of coast-to-coast travel solely on E85, a mostly renewable fuel containing 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
The students, who are part of the Iowa Central Aggies for Renewable Energy (ICARE), and a chaperone, will start their voyage from Washington D.C., with a scheduled arrival in Los Angeles at noon on Saturday, March 11.
“This is a great demonstration of the increased awareness and availability of renewable fuels such as E85,” said Jim Richardson, lead coordinator and professor at Iowa Central Community College. “With automakers like General Motors producing an abundance of flexible-fuel vehicles, we can help boost our country’s agriculture industry, save the environment, and reduce our dependence on petroleum.”
The students are Tami Davis, Ashley Heflin, Alex Lundgren and Bradley Westrum – posing in the picture with RFA president Bob Dineen, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senator Conrad Burns of Montana.
3 Comments
Gary Dikkers
What a great opportunity to do an actual fuel mileage test with E85. I hope they kept a log of the amount of E85 they burned and the distance driven.The EPA’s 2005 Fuel Economy Guide* says that an Avalanche should get about 19 mpg on the open road using gasoline and about 14 mpg using E85. (The E85 mileage is 73% of the figure for gasoline.) It would be interesting to see how the numbers on the team’s road trip compare to the EPA estimates. (We all know the EPA estimates are usually optimistic, but they do have value for showing a trend.)
AgWired » Follow College Students on Domestic Fuel
[...] The idea of blogging college students seems to be catching on. Over on Domestic Fuel, we’re getting some daily reports from students who are on a cross country tour fueled by E85. They’re in a Chevy Avalanche. We just got the first reports in today and I’m sure Cindy will have them posted later. You can see the original post on it here. [...]
Domestic Fuel » Kissing the Bricks
[...] These pictures of the ICARE Cross Country E85 team – Alex, Bradley, Ashley and Tami – at the Indianapolis Speedway are so adorable I wanted to highlight them in a separate post so they wouldn’t be missed. Photo credits go to Whitney Copeland Cole of Indiana AgriNews who was the only media person at the Indy with the group. Great shots! Thanks again Whitney. According to team member Bradley Westrum from the Day 2 post – we were only able to go a top speed of about 50 miles per hour. It truly was the opportunity of a life time. We stopped on the second lap to kiss the Brickyard, which is the strip of bricks that lay across the finish line, and is where every winner of a race that is held there, stops and kisses the bricks. After completing the second lap, we went through the pits, and concluded one of the most exciting parts of the trip. When we got back on the road we calculated how many laps we could complete on the track with one tank of E85. We figured that you could complete about 170 laps before running bone dry. [...]
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