What's outside today 35 - Volvo C30 F

This one went back today. It's the bioethanol-capable version of the C30 - it uses the same 1.8 litre engine as the Ford Fusion FFV that featured on the Verdict last autumn. The fuel itself is called E85 because it's 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol (the petrol is required for cold starting in northern Europe, apparently).


I had a chance to do the standard C30 about a year ago and I think its a fairly nice machine - and a good-looking one as well. I have to say I'm a bit surprised there aren't more on the roads, although pricing that's a little bit on the high side may be holding it back.


Unusual colour scheme - it's a sort of off-white pearlescent paint. More evidence, I suppose that the manufacturers are trying to find, if not the new black, then the new silver metallic.


Anyway, I've been testing and reporting on E85 capable cars since they first appeared in the UK about two and a half years ago and progress has been painfully slow - the car manufacturers and the supermarkets are often held up as the bad guys when it comes to environmental matters but in this case they've done their bit by making the cars and the fuel available. It's the government that's let the side down by not providing bigger tax incentives for renewable fuels, along with us, the car-buying public, for not buying the cars or the E85.

Lord Drayson goes racing in the USA

Lord (Paul) Drayson's departure from the government in order to concentrate on motor racing is widely covered in today's newspapers. I spent a fascinating day at Brands Hatch earlier this year interviewing him for an Independent feature about his racing career, which was topped off by a few laps of the circuit passengering Jonny Cocker - Drayson's talented young co-driver - in the peer's bioethanol powered racing Aston.

Some reports have suggested that there may be more to this development than meets the eye, but for me, the reason he gives for this change - that he wants to further his motor racing career while at the same time promoting the use of renewable fuels - rings true. When I interviewed him, he spoke openly about his desire to race internationally with the ultimate ambition of competing at Le Mans with a bioethanol-powered car.

As a motoring enthusiast and a firm believer in the benefits of biofuels, I can only wish him well in his campaign. As a UK taxpayer, I hope that his departure from government - described officially as leave of absence - doesn't turn out to be permanent. Defence procurement and supply, the area for which Lord Drayson was responsible, is a notoriously difficult part of the MoD, and with his strong business and engineering background, he seemed to be one of the few recent holders of the defence procurement post who was up to the epic financial and technical challenges involved.

One area in which he expressed a particular interest when I spoke to him was the possibility that the defence industry, with its very long lead times, might learn from Britain's successful motor racing sector, which innovates very rapidly and routinely incorporates these innovations almost immediately into its products. About a month ago, it was reported that the first meeting of UK motor racing firms and defence contractors had taken place - it will be interesting to see whether this initiative now continues and bears fruit.

Incidentally, the defence procurement job seems to attract motoring enthusiasts. The late Alan Clarke (of diaries fame) was one - Lord Drayson was another. I've got no idea whether the new minister, Ann Taylor, is a closet petrolhead, though.

What's outside today 25 - Ford C-Max Flexifuel

Outside my parents' place in Gloucestershire, that is - Morrisons is slowly expanding its network of forecourts that provide bioethanol-based E85 but any test of an E85-capable car still means heading for East Anglia or the West Country where the main clusters of pumps are to be found.


Same story as before - the fuel is slightly cheaper than unleaded but not by enough to offset the typical mpg penalty suffered when running on E85 (variously estimated at up to 30%). More movement is needed on the tax front before E85 can really take off - but if the fuel pricing can be got right, the E85 thing is a great concept. Unlike, say, LPG, E85 doesn't require a separate tank; cars like the C-Max FFV can run on any mixture of petrol and bioethanol in a single tank. And Ford doesn't charge a premium for FFV models, so you can buy one and just wait for the price of E85 to come down. If it doesn't, you can just run on unleaded without any drawbacks.


BTW renewable fuels have come in for a bit of criticism over the last year or so. It's important to bear in mind that bioethanol has nothing to do with the recent fuss about palm oil, which is an issue connected with bio-diesel. I'm still convinced renewables are an important part of our motoring future - if we're to have one at all - as long as sustainable and efficient methods of production can be enforced, either legally or by pressure from well-informed consumers asking lots of questions.

What's outside today 15 - Saab 93 BioPower

This is the BioPower version of the Saab 93. That means it can run either on normal unleaded or E85, a mix of 85% bioethanol and 15% unleaded. Externally, it's more or less indistinguishable from the standard model - apart, that is, from the enormous BioPower stickers attached to the sides of this test example.


Yesterday, I took it out on one of my favourite test routes - setting out from Cambridgshire to Norwich on the A11 before heading north to Cromer on the North Norfolk coast and than back home via Cley, Fakenham and Swaffham.

All jolly agreeable, and a route that allowed me to take in a stop-off at a Morrison E85 pump for a quick top-up - the one at the Norwich store, which lies within the shadow of the Carrow Road football ground, in fact.


Got back home in a good mood late in the evening, my head full of moderately warm thoughts towards the comfy, inoffensive if rather bare Saab. Made a cup of tea and casually picked up my copy of the delivery note for the 93 in order to take a closer look at it. What followed was the worst case of what Americans call 'sticker shock' I've had in connection with a Verdict test car since Ford sent us an admittedly very impressive Focus diesel estate about two years ago that had been specced up to the eyeballs for an on the road price of about 25 grand. The Saab - which I should, in fairness, mention is the priciest Vector Sport variant fitted with a few options like metallic paint - comes out at a scarcely believable GBP28,000.


I've always had a soft spot for Saabs and I'm a strong supporter of what the company is doing in promoting E85 with its BioPower models. But that price seems to be hopelessly ambitious to me. Remember that a Skoda Octavia is probably at least as well built as a Saab and, despite being Golf-based, is probably as roomy (in particular where luggage, as opposed to passenger space is concerned) as a 93. But Octavia prices start at about 11 grand; the deeply impressive and very rapid vRS estate version costs about GBP18,500.

Some other yardsticks - Mercedes C Class prices start at GBP23 thousand, BMW 3 Series prices at less than GBP21 thousand. And the Vauxhall Vectra estate starts at less than GBP16K - that's relevant because, as General Motors products, the 93 and the Vectra have quite a lot in common under the skin.

Anorak Corner 3 - Saab, Ford and their differing approaches to E85

Ford and Saab have so far been the front-runners in promoting the use of E85, a blend consisting of 15% unleaded and 85% renewable bioethanol. Both have introduced cars to the UK market that have been modified to run on this fuel. I understand that the main differences between these cars and the equivalent standard models are changes to the materials used in the various bits of pipework that make up the fuel system - E85 is more corrosive than the unleaded fuel most cars run on.

E85 also has a higher octane rating than unleaded - 105 is the figure that is usually quoted, compared with 95 for standard unleaded and 97 to 99 for super unleaded. Ford and Saab differ in how they handle this characteristic of E85. Ford sets up its engines so that they don't develop significantly more power when running on E85. Perhaps the company takes the view that there will be a higher degree of acceptance for E85 if the experience of driving a car running on the fuel doesn't feel different to that of driving one running on unleaded - a question, perhaps of not scaring the horses by giving them too many horsepower to play with.

Saab, by contrast, has years of experience with knock sensors and turbo-charging to fall back on and sets its engines up to exploit the higher octane rating of E85 - its 2.0t BioPower unit, for example, delivers 20% more horsepower and 16% more torque than the equivalent unleaded-only engine. This difference certainly makes itself felt on the road.


So which of these approaches is correct? I don't think it's possible to answer that question clearly at the moment. Saab's and Ford's current engines are very much the first generation of E85-capable power units; they are adapted from existing designs and aren't fully optimised to run on E85 as they still need to be capable of running on standard unleaded as well. But if E85, or even pure bioethanol becomes universally available, it looks like more drastic changes to engines could be introduced to exploit the higher octane ratings - small turbocharged engines with lots of power that minimise the fuel consumption penalty of running on bioethanol look like the way it's going.

Hawker Beechcraft King Air 350

When it comes to planes, I've only got one rule - avoid getting into anything small with propellers. That rule had to be broken yesterday in order to make the trip north from Stockholm to see Sweden's pioneering second-generation bioethanol plant - about which, more later.


Actually, as I discovered from a quick bit of web research once I was safely back on the ground, I shouldn't have worried because, as small planes go, the twin turboprop Beechcraft King Air 350 is a serious piece of equipment. Before take-off, I asked the pilot whether we would be flying at a lower altitude than commercial airliners and to my surprise, he said 'not really'. When I checked later, I found that the King Air 350 will indeed go all the way to 35,000 ft because it has a pressurised cabin. The take-off performance seemed pretty good as well.

That said, the King Air felt a bit small inside, and it did pitch around a bit when we hit turbulence - at one stage on the approach to Stockholm on the return journey, the entire contents of my teacup jumped across the cabin onto Ford's PR man, who, it has to be said, accepted this unwelcome development with commendable equanimity. All in all, though, a great trip that provided wonderful views of Sweden's lakes and forests on a beautiful clear day.

Al Gore has been criticised and even ridiculed for flying the world in a private jet to promote the message of his film about the dangers of global warming An Inconvenient Truth. I did wonder whether flying in a private plane to report on a bioethanol plant isn't similarly objectionable. Perhaps - but activities aimed at getting across the important message about climate change and the possibilities for a low-CO2 future probably count among the better uses of scarce fossil fuels.

E85 in Sweden

Just arrived in Sweden to see what Ford and Volvo in particular are doing with bioethanol/E85 here.

Sweden is a long way ahead of everywhere else in Europe when it comes to this sort of thing, so looking forward to an interesting couple of days - including, and this is the hot subject at the moment in this area, a visit to a second-generation bioethanol plant. Second generation = using e.g. wood waste etc. instead of plants that could otherwise be used as food. It's back to that distinction between good bioethanol and bad bioethanol again.

BMW's Hydrogen 7

I had the chance to try the Hydrogen 7 yesterday at the SMMT test day, and a quick spin around the high-speed bowl at Millbrook showed that while the current 7 has been around for a few years now, it's still pretty good to drive, and also that its impressive performance and refinement do not seem to suffer when this specially-converted version is running on hydrogen.

In fact the Hydrogen 7 is capable of using either hydrogen or unleaded and can even be switched between the two fuels on the move at the press of a button, a change that is scarcely felt at all by driver or passengers.

I haven't looked into hydrogen in as much detail as I have bio-fuels, but I understand that BMW's approach of using liquid hydrogen to power a combustion engine is comparatively unusual; my guess is that this is thought by the company to be the best way of developing cars that can run on alternative fuels but still retain the sporty qualities drivers value in a BMW.

One drawback is that the separate hydrogen tank used by this model eats into the 7's boot space (see photos below), although this is probably no worse than the boots of Lexus' big hybrids, which suffer a similar problem. This does however, remind us of a big advantage enjoyed by cars that can run on bioethanol-based E85, where both unleaded and the alternative fuel can be mixed in any proportions in the same fuel tank and use the same pipework.



At the moment, only about 100 Hydrogen 7s are being built and there is just one UK fuelling point (at Wembley in North London). It's difficult to see big numbers of liquid hydrogen cars being sold, at least until the infrastructure is better developed, but at least BMW is pushing things along. In the meantime, though, the measures incorporated into standard models under the manufacturer's Efficient Dynamics programme, such as cutting, and then automatically restarting, cars' engines when stopped, and exploiting regenerative braking, are likely to have more of an impact.

BioEthanol and the Road to Sustainable Transport - some more follow up

The presentation materials from this excellent conference held last week at Imperial College can be found at http://www.baff.info/english/

Bioethanol conference at Imperial - a PS

Three more points from the seminar at Imperial.

Everyone I spoke to who had an opinion on the subject thought that the 18% fuel consumption penalty we recorded for running on bioethanol in the Saab BioPower was a bit on the low side. A man from Ford put the likely figure at 30% although I continue to hear suggestions - I'm not sure how well-founded they are - that this penalty can be smaller when cruising than in stop-start traffic, and that it may be lower in Saabs rather than in Ford's E85-capable models. Given that our test was in a Saab and didn't involve any town driving (it was a mix of motorways and twisty A roads but didn't really cover any town driving), perhaps our result wasn't too far out of line after all. Of course, our test was a simple brim to brim affair but at the seminar I met the man who used to do the AA's incredibly rigorous fuel consumption tests and now does similar work on an independent basis. He told me he was in the middle of carrying out one of his highly detailed tests on the BioPower. I will be interested to see what he comes up with, which I suspect will be the closest thing we get to an authoritative answer for the time being.

The second point concerns the possible damage to the Brazilian rain forest that may arise from increased demand for biofuels. Apparently this is a red herring because the rain forest isn't really very close to the best latitudes for growing sugar cane. What may do for the rain forest, so it is said, is the growing demand for protein and therefore soya. More generally, though, cultivation for ethanol is certainly in competition with cultivation for food, which could prove to be highly problematical in the long run.

The third thing to mention is that Britain is due shortly to get its first bioethanol plant using British sugar beet as a feedstock. It belongs to British Sugar and it's located in Norfolk.

Bioethanol and the Road to Sustainable Development

A fascinating day-long seminar on this subject at London's Imperial College today - I'm grateful to Saab for putting me on to this.

Several contributors from government, the private sector and the academic world explained the role of bioethanol in tackling climate change and future fossil fuel shortages. I can't possibly do all of the arguments justice here but I've picked out what I think are a few of the most interesting aspects.

The first thing you notice at any event on this subject is that a lot of the speakers are Swedes. That's because Sweden has aggressively embraced bio-fuels - the Swedish prime minister declared that the country would be independent of oil would by 2020, although it was a car dealer that got the ball rolling by importing suitably specced American Ford Tauruses in the nineties. This gave Ford an early lead that it was able to build on with bio-capable versions of the Focus produced in Europe. Saab is the other main player with the BioPower versions of its 9-3 and 9-5 models, while Scania has been promoting the use of bioethanol in bus and truck engines that operate on diesel principles. One of the best customers for buses running on bioethanol has been Stockholm's public transport company; buses with Scania's third generation ethanol engine - which should equip it to tackle longer out-of-town journeys - are eagerly awaited there. A Scania bioethanol bus trial is imminent in London too. Not every lesson from Sweden can be applied here, of course. The country has a low population density and a large forestry industry, for example, although I was slightly surprised to learn that the Swedish market uses bioethanol from Brazilian sugar cane (Brazil is the other trailblazer in the use of bio-fuels). I had thought the feedstock for Swedish bioethanol production was cellulose derived from the timber industry; this is however, expected to play a large role in future. Nevertheless, the Swedes' efforts put those of most other countries to shame.

An interesting snippet of information came from a representative of OKQ8, a fuel retailer with a 27% market share in petrol and a 40% share in bioethanol in Sweden - while flex-fuel cars that can run on E85 (a blend of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol) get all the headlines, most of the use of bioethanol in cars in Sweden so far is accounted for by the small amount of bioethanol - 5% - that is added in to standard unleaded; this blend can be used by cars without modification. Bioethanol can already be added to standard unleaded in the UK I believe, and the forthcoming Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) will require us to be 5% renewable by 2010.

Another important point is that different sorts of bio-fuels are not all equally beneficial in their impact. Thanks to the work of academics like Dr Jeremy Woods at Imperial we seem to be getting a better understanding of the differences between so-called 'bad bioethanol' and 'good bioethanol', which is a function of a host of factors such as the crops used, the processes used and the extent to which fossil fuels are used in production and distribution. The UK RTFO can't stipulate that only good bioethanol be used as this would be against world trade rules. However, companies will have to document the provenance of their fuels under RTFO, and it will be up to us to keep them honest with our fuel buying decisions.

Saab Biopower

A quick post while stuck on the ground at Heathrow waiting to go to Germany to try some Audis.

Today's Indy carries the write-up of our fuel consumption test of Saab's 9-5 BioPower. Since Saab and Ford introduced cars to the UK market last year that are capable of running on E85, a blend of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol, there has been a certain amount of discussion of the pros and cons of this fuel, which is available at a small but growing number of branches of Morrisons. On the one hand, E85 has a higher octane rating and a modest price advantage (usually 2p per litre). On the other, it delivers fewer mpg.

Estimates of the exact size of this penalty vary enormously, so we decided to do a test - the answer that we came up with was that Saab's 9-5 BioPower suffers an 18% mpg penalty when running on E85 over a wide range of road conditions. We did plan a more elaborate test involving two cars running in parallel, one on E85 and one on unleaded, but after months of trying, we just couldn't get two directly comparable cars together at the same time, so we settled for running a single car in one direction on E85 and then retracing our route on unleaded - not ideal, but hopefully fairly representative.

I've been following this subject for over a year now, and the more I look into it, the more complicated it seems to get. Official CO2 emissions data, for example, just look at tailpipe emissions for cars running on unleaded, not what is sometimes called the well-to-wheel impact, or the impact over the whole life of a car. That means cars running on E85 get no official credit for using a renewable fuel that has a built-in carbon offset in the form of the CO2 absorbed by the crops that are used to produce bioethanol. Take another example, the hybrid Toyota Prius, which delivers a very low tailpipe CO2 figure of 104g/km. What about the amount of energy that is used in manufacturing this immensely complicated car? What about the disposal of the large numbers of heavy batteries hybrids use?

I'm off to a day-long conference on the subject at Imperial College on Friday, which I hope will help me understand this a bit better. I'm not really expecting to come back with clear answers, though, just more insight into how complicated the whole thing is and why.