India has finally started getting E85 fuel at the pump, but there’s something nobody is talking about. Brazil did the exact same thing some time back and the story should be nothing but a lesson for India.
So according to the official roadmap, India’s plan is simple. E85 fuel will be available at 500 petrol pumps by the end of 2026, and 5,000 pumps by the end of 2027. Currently, the only car that supports E85 fuel is the newly-launched WagonR Flex Fuel, which has been launched at a price of ₹7.24 lakh onwards.
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However, let’s go back to the 1970s once. There was a global fuel crisis like right now. Brazil was pretty much in the same boat as India is today – importing massive amounts of gasoline. And their government had the exact same idea: “We grow a ton of sugarcane, so why not just make ethanol out of it and increase the blend with petrol?” And they went all in. This wasn’t a small pilot programme, it was implemented at a massive scale. Even cars that ran on 100 percent ethanol were also launched.
In the beginning, it seemed to be working. Cars were selling, fuel supply was good and the prices remained consistent. Soon, however, things started going sideways. Since most of the sugarcane was being diverted to ethanol production, sugar started getting expensive, and when sugar got expensive, even ethanol prices started going up. It went on till the time there was a massive nationwide crisis and Brazil suffered an ethanol shortage. There came a time when you’d pull up to a petrol pump and there was simply no ethanol available. The people who had bought pure ethanol cars were completely stranded. Stuck.
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That’s when the Brazilian government realised they can not force an entire population to just switch to different fuels overnight. They reduced the blends of ethanol to E25, E30, and more and encouraged car companies to launch more flex fuel vehicles that can run on anything from E20 to E100. This gave people the option to choose their blend depending on their car’s standard.
Now, higher blends of ethanol also have their advantages, but the problem in India right now is that we have millions of cars on our roads that aren’t even E20 compliant, let alone E30 or higher blends of ethanol. With so many cars just being defunct due to longstanding issues with ethanol makes the switch in India a bit more of a serious problem since the majority of cars on our roads right now aren’t even E20 compliant.
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