I love my car. Is perfect and boring. Had to modify it.

Hello gen4 owners,
I love my car but it is getting too reliable and too predictable, in a word, boring But I know what I bought . I have a 2016 Gen4 Executive (everything on), and 17 inch wheels. to date after 27000 km , I average 4 L/100Km.

Because I have a bad habit of modifying things for the sake of it ( my poor Vespa ), I have decided to make my car more interesting.

At a tiny car service that does now in 70% of their time on any cars due to demand ( mostly Dodge RAMs, for obvious exhaust and pollution tax reasons) multi fuel conversions, I have installed an eFlexFuel kit on my gen4 Prius, to run on E85 ethanol, and see what it happens especially now in the winter.
I will let you know how it goes down in the coming months. For science !

At the moment after the installation my fuel tank still has only gasoline and will have to wait a few weeks to empty it and put only ethanol in it. I rarely drive that car.
From the past 3 rides last weekend nothing has changed in gasoline consumption with the kit installed, same 4L/100 Km.
The app I have installed on my phone for the eFlexFuel kit shows today the 5% ethanol in the normal gasoline in the fuel tank, standard here in Sweden.

I am sure my consumption will not remain at 4 L/100Km on ethanol, and might stay at 5L even in the summer, but lower Co2 on lower fuel price.. why not ?

Here in Sweden, just like i Finland, the production of ethanol E85 is environmentally friendly and the price per liter is lower than gasoline. E85 is 12 SEK vs gasoline 16 SEK. I'm not gonna get rich, but it is something
Given the fact the projected exhausts with E85 will be around half of the gasoline on g/km, I believe it is worth it. I will do some exhaust measurements on E85 after the first ethanol fuel tank and come back with some numbers. Now on gasoline, my gen4 model has 76g/km CO2.

Others have done it on gen3 Prii and CHRs in Finland and France. Haven't found anyone yet with a Gen4 modified so I had to try it

Maybe is a good idea, maybe not .. we will see.
I have also just created a Fuelly account to track my ethanol fuel ups and consumption.

FYI, I talked to the Toyota dealership and their engineers before installing the kit and they did not recommend it , but they are curious about the results in the coming months. And yes, they will keep servicing my car )))

 

Short update while the gasoline tank is emptying.
I took a ride today for 60 km to get some data for Torque pro. I have a Carista OBD2 dongle.

Some details about the ethanol conversion kit before talking about the Torque pro data:

Looks like this before installation:


The working principle is this :



This is the data the eFlexFuel App shows when running with gasoline ( 5% ethanol in it ) :



For this ride :




The Torque pro data fro the above ride is is in .csv format and you will need a viewer software to browse the data like the TorqueLogViewerAndAnalyzer. I have uploaded the file under this post, trackLog-2019-Dec-15_10-19-31.csv.txt , you will just have to delete the .txt extension to see the csv.

extentThe Torque custom PIDs I am using are for a Prius gen3, so there is not much data on the hybrid battery, but the ICE data is still working.
I wanted to see what is the instant and average CO2 g/km on this ride and the numbers are a bit weird Ö average ended up to be 95 g/km instead of 76 how the vehicle is rated by Toyota from the factory. Looking forward to see the numbers for ethanol 85. Hopefully half of that

 

I know what the recommendation is for fuel. I will let you know how it goes with E85 next year. I could tell you that gen3 prius owners, CH-R owners have already used flex fuel kits for more than a year in Finland and France and no one complained.

 

I agree and it is true. Only not anymore today and not with the ethanol sold in Sweden.
Because :

In 2007, 2008 when ethanol picked up in Europe, E85 was containing lots of crap in it which not only damaged old engines, but was hard to be used also by the specifically marketed flex-fuel cars sold in 2008. So bio residue, sulfate and other salts in the E85 were the culprit then and also old engines.
Because of those horror stories in 2008, no one touched E85 ever since and it died fast as a eco friendly solution here in Sweden and Finland.
But because too many old Volvos were harmed ) the government has instated new regulations for the ethanol quality and what to not contain, which are a reality since 2015. Now it is a EU standard for E85 to what crap it should not contain.

From a study in 2007 ''Bioethanol and biodiesel contain several impurities despite passing through several cleaning steps. Especially concerning are dissolved salts which can damage engines. Thus, the determination of sulfate and chloride in ethanol-based fuels is an important quality criterion. ''

Now 2018, modern engines manufacturers have also learned the lesson and are better built to prevent that type of damage, plus the E85 produced in EU does not contain the amounts of salts and sulfates which busted engines then. It is safe

The sad reality is that in order to reach EU emission targets for 2030, the sold fuels in EU will have to reduce their pollutants with 30% on gasoline and 60% on diesel. One way will be to force all fuel production to adopt higher percentage of ethanol. Now it is 5% here. Next year will be 10%. the target is 40% by 2030 in gasoline.


I am not worried about it, plus I can go back to gasoline only at any point.

 

No idea and don't really care. We are installing next year to 2021 charging stations in our garage in the building where I have my apartment. 2022 I am buying something without an ICE and hopefully with an electric engine on each wheel

 

Hello again, gen4 owners,
With a couple of liters of gasoline in the tank left, I filled up the first tank of ethanol E85 yesterday.
In the winter the E85 in Sweden is actually E75 and the rest gasoline, so they would make sure everyone will be able to start up their car on cold starts. So the real E85 will be in end of March at the pump.
With what gasoline I had left in my tank my first ethanol fill up ended up to be 68% ethanol. The price today is 13 SEK for one liter.

This is what the eFlexFuel app gave me after driving 10 kilometers :

And this is the kit under the bonnet installed.


Then I took a 96 Km drive on the highway just to gather some data with my Torque Pro app.
I can tell you that I could not feel any difference in behavior from the engine when it kicks in from EV. It is not even louder, it was weird, because I was expecting to feel a lively engine due to higher burning temps.
Anyway, at the end of the ride the odometer gave me this mileage value which looks good but is total BS :

I have attached the recorded logging file from Torque Pro as a file.csv.txt . Just remove the .txt and open the file in xcel or the TorqueLogViewerAndAnalyser software.

Now some relevant data. I have compared this ethanol log with a previous drive took on the same highway, for 60 Km but on gasoline ( log file at the beginning of the thread ). I did look at several plotted graphs to see any major changes. So yeah.. Everything looks good.

But the average L/100Km i get from the car is total BS. So I usually drive with the original 17 inch tires in the summer. And when it tells me that I get 4,3 L/100Km , I believe it.
But now in the winter I use 16 inch tires and it gives me overoptimistic numbers.

In my previous drive in December for 60 Km on highway on gasoline, the car showed me also 3,6 L/100Km. In reality the average from the Torque Pro logged data for that ride was 4,3l/100Km.

Today I got the same thing. The car shows me 3,6L/100Km after 96 Km on ethanol , and the average from the Torque Pro log for this drive is 5,2 L/100Km !?!?! Wth car...

Looking at several plotted graphs on the gasoline drive vs the ethanol one, some of the ethanol values are a bit more erratic than the gasoline ones, but the averages for the lengths of each ride are not that far apart. I was looking more at temperature gauges, fuel and air mixture values, and mileage.

I made a small compassion chart for average values :



I was expecting to see a higher coolant temperature on average, but the difference was just 5 deg. C, while the catalyst temp was the same 550 deg. C average on both fuels.

Next step is to see if I can get the road authority here to do an emission test on my car while running with ethanol. I am curious about which could be the minimum a gen4 Prius could emit.

All in all it looks good, the car runs well as it always did. Ethanol is cheaper but I do not see the gain because I lose it on the mileage,so is all 0 SEK gain and just lower CO2.
I have set up my Fuelly account on ethanol only and registered my first fill up. This year I might be the only one who gets a constant over 5L/100Km on my fuelly badge and everyone will ask how is this person driving with so poor mileage ? )


To all the gen4 owners, I wish you
A HAPPY NEW YEAR ! for 2020 and 0 accidents

 

I just went to the Toyota service for the yearly checkup/oil change and afterwrads, on the way home, I got this result :

( for the first time on ethanol, the average mpg on the car dashboad was the same reported by the Torque Pro )

The car reported 3,6 L / 100 Km, after the 80 Km trip. ( forgot to take a picture )
Torque Pro reported from 3,4 L to 3,5 L / 100 Km. I would call that close or almost accurate on both.



I can't wait to empty this first ethanol tank and see what Fuelly will report ( vs what the car trip reports as mpg for that tank )