A group of Iowa Central Community College students will be going on a roadtrip that’ll take them from the east coast to the west coast. Brad Westrum, one of the students, says it begins March 4th with a plane ride. The students will fly to Washington, D.C. where they’ll climb into a Chevy Avalanche that runs on E-85 — the 85 percent blend of ethanol.
The group will drive straight through, taking the wheel in shifts, and plan to make it to Des Moines on Tuesday, March 7th. The trip will end in Los Angeles where they’ll board a plane and fly back home. “This trip was incredibly hard to plan,” Westrum says.
They had to plot out the points on the map where they could fill up with E-85, and Westrum says there aren’t that many pumps even though there are a lot of people driving “flexible fuel” vehicles that could run on E85. There’ll be one 380-mile stretch between fill-ups.