As a certified Automotive…

As a certified Automotive and Heavy truck technician I have a number of concerns with the use of ethanol in motor vehicle fuels. I have seen first hand the damage that ethanol causes on older vehicles, particularly those which still use carburetors. There are still a significant number of these vehicles registered in Ontario and they are not designed to operate on these blended fuels. They do not operate efficiently on the higher octane fuels so it leaves the motorist with limited options. The fuels systems are simply not designed to deal with the corrosive properties of ethanol.
With respect to the wider Ontario fleet, the addition of alcohol to fuel significantly reduces the energy of each litre of fuel, which means every single vehicle will immediately be less efficient and motorists will be forced to buy 15% more fuel to travel the same distance. This, in my opinion, places an unfair financial burden on every motorist in the province that purchases gasoline. Based on the financial data I was provided by Agriculture Canada, corn crops will for the foreseeable future be a subsidized crop which means that taxpayers will have to pay the farmer to grow the crop and also pay to make up for the loss of energy in each litre of motor fuel.
Lastly, every motorist in Ontario was already asked to cough up an additional 4.3 cents per litre of gasoline to fund cap and trade. Please keep in mind that the taxpayers resources are not infinite. I look forward to hearing your response on these 5 items raised.
1 - Damage to older vehicles, not engineered for ethanol/higher octane 2 - Reduced fuel milage 3 - Cost of higher fuel consumption 4 - Cost growing corn 5 - Tax burden

[Original Comment ID: 211988]