The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 221
When MTBE was finally ordered off the market, I heard all the same complaints
about the coming of E10. Fortunately, I personally never experienced any problems with using E10.
There was a time when I did have to replace the fuel pump and some of the
hoses, but this occurred less than one year after I purchased the vehicle in
England and had it shipped to the U.S. So it was during the leaded-gasoline
era. It was my understanding that this was the first time the car needed to have
its fuel pump replaced. I never again had to replace those parts.
The second point is that all parts will need to be replaced at some point anyway,
as I discovered with my Bentley. So if it's necessary to switch out a part, switch
to a part that is not so susceptible to ethanol. I know that car collectors would
rather not use non-original parts, when possible, but that's the price that you
pay for progress. The reasons for mandating a switch away from leaded gasoline were to benefit all of society, not just a relatively minute number of enthusiasts. The argument that was made to Jay Leno after his AutoWeek article was:
Why should we have to be concerned with your collection. You should be concerned with us...the very vast majority.
I'm sure you would agree that Jay can afford to change parts, and he can definitely afford to have non-ethanol gasoline shipped to his garage, if he doesn't
already do so. So his beef and attempt to sway national policy is very exaggerated, greedy, and self-centered. I've briefly met Jay Leno on a couple of occasions at automotive events. Those occasions do not qualify for me knowing
what kind of guy he is. However, I do have a very good friend who was helped
by Jay; Jay went out of his way when he clearly did not have to. Based on this
experience I would say that Jay was not a greedy and self-centered person.
Combining that with Jay's other public articles and videos in which he has expressed great favor of ethanol and other alternative fuels, I was very surprised
at Jay's about-face on ethanol. To me, it happened only because Jay was looking for sponsorship from the oil companies of his new automotive TV show.
July 27, 2015
Posted by BRIAN W
Mr. Rauch, you made some good points about ethanol, but it looks like there
are other automobile writers who disagree with you. I found this article from
Edmunds.com while searching the Internet and they say that ethanol delivers
