New gas to destroy cars?

Factual Questions
1

Got this in an email -

"New gas on market will destroy any car that is older than 2012. If you don’t watch this one, it could cost you dearly!

Warnings Not to Use ‘E15’ Gas in Your Car | Fox Business Video"

Now, it’s Fox News so I’m not sure I trust them to know their names, but I couldn’t find anything on Snopes, so…

2

Destroy like kaboom or gradual destruction of engine components ?

3

Destruction of engine parts - I think it was corrosion.

4

Here is a link to an article by USA Today about this:

I haven’t read the whole article yet, but the warning comes from AAA so it seems to be legit.

5

I would not trust that URL, it is probably drive by malware. The email has a scammy feel to it.

6

Did you actually watch the video on your cite?

Fox isn’t claiming this at all. They’re reporting that AAA is claiming this, and that several major auto manufacturers are stating using the fuel will void the cars warranty. They also reported that the fuel is fine for flex-fuel type engines.

7

I’m not surprised at this. I know that gas with 10% ethanol can cause problem with small lawnmower type engines (ethanol causes gasoline to go bad sooner resulting in gummed up carburetors even after only a month of no use and damages rubber parts like fuel lines.) Gas stored in containers should be used in less than a month or so. (This is from personal experience).

Ethanol can also absorb moisture which could cause a corrosion problem. A car driven daily shouldn’t have this problem though.

8

There’s already E85 fuel available in some locations that will damage all but flex-fuel vehicles. If your car is not a flex-fuel vehicle (and if you don’t know, it isn’t) you just don’t use it.

9
10

Ah! I guess my mistake was to not put E15 in the search. Thanks!

11

I think destroy like gradual degradation potentially leading to failure down the road (no pun intended). The engine control computer might get confused and be unable to run the engine well and you could get poor performance.

I have a flex-fuel car and it runs E85 fine, though it gets lower fuel efficiency. Since the manual says it’s ok to mix E85 and regular gas, I assume that another proportion such as E15 would work ok because you could effectively make E15 by mixing regular gas and E85 in the right proportion.