E10 Fuel Additives?

The real issue with E10 is the increased level of ethanol eats seals and pipes on old engines and loosens deposits in fuel lines etc. Even stuff that would be considered quite modern with plastic components in the fuel system have had issues.

www.whatcar.com/advice/owning/e10-biofuel-what-is-it-and-how-could-it-affect-you/n18069

Can't help thinking it is a storm in a teacup, ethanol has been used in other parts of the world for donkeys years, and there are plenty of older cars still going strong, the poor quality of hoses sold now etc worries me more.

Only thing I would be carefull of is long term storage.

To some degree, yes. On older stuff, well most, you can get decent hose from Cohline which will be resistant, and the hoses can be easily replaced ; the fuel tanks being metal will help matters too.

But some older stuff will be questionable. Take my old Merc 280SE. That's got fuel injectors, a very early type of MAP sensor (it has brass belows inside) and a fuel pump which may not be able to be made ethanol resistant. That's a problem for keeping that on the road. Small wonder the Citroen DS folks rip off the D-Jetronic systems on DSs in France (yes, seriously ; it's something the Citroen Owners Club even recommends owners do ; that doesn't sound like a storm in a teacup approach ; some have caught fire with the D-Jet system with it basically always pumping fuel due to its design). Would Triumph PI stuff be OK I wonder or Mercs with Kugelfischer pumps; where a rebuild is £2.5k for one....

A document was present a while back on a Government website showing which cars would be 'safe' on E10 fuels; the rest of Europe went over earlier. Basically, it's anything after 2005ish. With stuff with formed fuel lines before than, which Pug 306s and BMW of sorts have, they'll potentially run into issues where an off the shelf solution can cause issues.

E85 is known to eat into Ally to some degree, so again, that's another question mark around E10, although I reckon it should be OK at that level.

Classic car fires weren't so well known about until E5 became more present at the pumps as well .

There has been ethanol in uk fuel since 1992.

A 5% increase isn’t going to cause the chaos the hand wringers are saying, unless you’re already running a car that isn’t ethanol safe on ethanol fuel.

Pretty much all European and American markets have been using ethanol in varying degrees (but all more than 10%) since the mid eighties. They didn’t make special non ethanol hoses for non ethanol markets in that time, they just made a ethanol safe hose for everything. My e28 bmw, ‘88 Nissan laurel, lada riva, ‘92 Passat all have ethanol safe fuel systems. A lot of American stuff goes much further back than that, ‘corn gas’ is all you can get in large parts of America.

The number of cars this effectS really is tiny, and they should have had ethanal safe stuff fitted 30 years ago anyway. no one has given a sh1t for the past 30 years it’s been in there, so why now with the marginal increase in %? It’s just the way our sensationist media works these days.

Google is full of information.
All US pump fuel HAS to be a minimum 2% ethanol by law. The most common fuel in the US is E10 followed by E15.
They’ve been putting ethanol in regular pump gas at up to 10% concentration since the oil crisis in 1974.

We as a market are way behind the times when it comes to ethanol. Most other markets have been using it for longer and in higher concentrations than we have.

A marginal increase from 5% to 10% content is inconsequential. Your car is either ethanol safe or it isn’t. And if it isn’t you shouldn’t have put fuel in bought in the uk since 1992.
you can’t then act surprised when the fuel lines melt and it sets on fire.

Make no mistake, it's worth changing the fuel hoses for half decent hose.

On my 2CV and the 280SE (albeit the latter started leaking in the engine bay) I changed the fuel hoses for this very reason. After all, it would be a shame to lose a car due to simple issues.

This link is a bit more informative than the Whatcar one - www.acea.be/uploads/publications/ACEA_E10_compatibility.pdf

Most manufacturers will quote a date from when they tested ethanol fuels, they are not saying cars before that aren't compatible just that they have no idea what if any the effect will be and certainly aren't guaranteeing anything.