Five Fuels -- No Waiting

By By Tom Ripley

Are you bi-fuel curious? Volvo can go you one, er, actually three better.  It's imaginatively named Volvo Multi-Fuel is a five-cylinder prototype car designed to run on, well, multiple fuels. At least one of them you have probably heard of -- Volvo charmingly calls it petrol, but you probably refer to it as gasoline.  Others in the mix are natural gas (which you might burn in your stove but not in your car), hythane, biomethane, and bioethanol E85.  For those of you who aren't chemistry majors, hythane is a mix of 10 percent hydrogen and 90 percent methane.  Bioethanol E85 is a mix of 85 percent bioethanol and 15 percent gasoline. 

The two-liter five-cylinder engine produces 200 horsepower, which gives the vehicle spritely performance.  With the benefits of turbocharging that has been tuned for optimized use with all five fuels, it can accelerate from zero to 62 miles per hour (100 km/h) in just 8.7 seconds. This makes the car responsive and fun to drive. As you would expect, the Multi-Fuel is just as safe as all Volvo vehicles, with the added bonus of being exceptionally clean. One of its benefits is that combustion of pure renewable fuels like hydrogen, biomethane and bioethanol make negligible net contribution of fossil carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  Carbon dioxide has been tabbed by some as a contributor to global warming.

"The whole car is optimised for high performance, driving on any of the five different fuels," said Mats Mor Next Feature>>