[pyotr]

E85 is a bloated political/pork movement and will never fly because ethanol costs more to produce than gasoline even with it so heavily subsidized. The environmental cost of producing the ethanol is high and the final gas mileage of ethanol-based gas is 15-30% less than regular gasoline. Thus you have more expensive gas which gets you less mileage than regular gas and which will cause wholesale destruction of huge tracts of farmland requiring enormous inputs of precious and water and fertilizer which is another lecture in itself. It has been estimated that the only way for ethanol-based fuels to work would be for gas to rise about $5/gallon AND for the manufacturing processes to become more sophisticated and use waste weeds and agricultural waste plants instead of corn to produce ethanol - even so, the existing state subsidies by the taxpayers as in Montana or Wisconsin will need to continue to make the business models work, the Economist had an article about these ethanol-based fuels in the past month and estimated any potential large-scale models to begin only several decades from now. If ever ethanol-fuels become more financially feasible, the great oil countries/states/companies would flood the market with cheap gas in order to make the experiment fail - at that point if you owned a car which could drive 30mpg on $1/gallon fuel versus driving 25mpg on $5/gallon fuel, which one do you think most citizens would choose? So E85 is a bloated political/pork movement and will never fly with us consumers.

If you want to make a difference, I'd go join the Peace Corps; driving a trendy car which still uses gasoline and gets only marginally better mileage than an econo-car doesn't qualify as making a difference.