Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley will meet with the C-E-O of General Motors this week to talk about ethanol and flex-fuel vehicles that can burn E-85. Grassley says G-M has done a good job promoting the benefits of cars, trucks, vans and S-U-Vs that run on the corn-based fuel.
Grassley says “But we need to go beyond that. There are one-and-a-half million G-M flex fuel vehicles on the road today. I’m disappointed that G-M expects to only sell 400-thousand this year. This seems like a drop in the bucket especially after visiting the G-M plant in Brazil that makes almost solely flex fuel vehicles.”
Grassley toured Argentina and Brazil in March and says seven in every ten cars sold in those nations are flex-fuel. He says the flex fuel vehicles made in Brazil are capable of using 100-percent ethanol. Grassley says he wants G-M’s chief to explain why cars made in the U.S. factories don’t have that same capability. He says ethanol has come under fire in several areas with legitimate, and some not-so-legitimate claims, but Grassley says he’s sure G-M can help to quash some of the negatives.
Grassley says cars running on ethanol get reduced miles per gallon than gasoline, but G-M apparently has the technology to extract more energy out of ethanol, virtually erasing the disparity between ethanol and gasoline. Iowa is the nation’s leader, by far, in ethanol production with some 30 factories either in operation or under construction.