beema41;24683 wroteI'm a little shy of e10 fuels. I had a BA Falcon work car once that suffered a major fuel system failure and I'm sure was killed by the mandatory use of e10, it always run like a dog, would piss and fart, stall and backfire. I once 'accidently' dropped a tank of premium 95 into it and it was like waving a magic wand, instantly fixed.
My personal experience is that I've run my 760T almost exclusively on 95 octane E10 from United servo's for a little over 200,000km now, and my wife's VT Commodore gets filled with it ~80% of the time, for the last 100,000km or so.
No fuel system issues from either car during that time that I would attribute to the fuel. The 760 had the original fuel pump and fuel pressure regulator fail somewhere around 350,000km, but I'd say that's just wear and tear. The VT had one injector fail at about 280,000km, again I doubt that was caused by fuel. The cars have now done 495k and 360k respectively.
Car owners, and mechanics, love to blame E10 fuel for every fuel system issue that can't be easily diagnosed or explained. A few facts:
Ethanol does attack natural rubber components. No modern car uses any natural rubber parts in the fuel system, for this reason. If you are putting a lot of ethanol through an early model carby system, you may have carby or fuel pump problems, if there are natural rubber seals etc. in those components.
Ethanol does absorb moisture from the atmosphere, like diesel does. If your fuel filler cap has no seal or the hose has come off your carbon canister, and your car sits for long periods without being driven, you might end up with some water in the fuel. If your car is well maintained and driven often, this will never be an issue.
E10 has a slightly lower energy content per litre than ethanol free fuel. Therefore, slightly more of it has to be burnt, to produce the same amount of power. In a car with engine management that has oxygen sensor feedback, this means that slightly more fuel will be used, in order to keep the air/fuel ratio where the engine management wants it.
In a car without oxygen sensor feedback, like my 760, it simply means the car uses the same amount of fuel as it otherwise would, it just runs slightly leaner. I don't know how much less energy per litre E10 has, I've heard rumours of 1.5-2% less.
These negative effects are obviously proportional to how much ethanol is in the fuel, hence the standard of 10%. At 10%, these affects are all pretty negligible, and pretty much all modern cars are designed and approved to operate on it.
beema41;24684 wroteYeah, I might have my dates all wrong. I remember 1986 being significant for something unleaded. It may have been the year catalytic converters were introduced along with unleaded fuels. I do recall noticing the pungent smell of the early cars like VL commodores with the Nissan 3.0 fitted. Rotten egg gas compared to burnt lead!
See my earlier post, '86 was when new cars had to be able to run on unleaded, and had to meet stricter emissions limits. Cat's were the only way to bring emissions of certain gases down below these limits.
The rotton egg smell is caused when a car with a cat has a fuel system issue and is running a bit too rich. The partially burnt fuel leaving the engine is burnt more completely inside the super hot cat, and gives off that smell.