New Delhi: Toyota will unveil India's first flex-fuel car and Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari will unveil the vehicle. This would not be a launch but a reveal of an experimental car to test this technology on Indian roads as a pilot project. Not many details are there regarding the first flex-fuel car from Toyota but we do not think that it is from the current line-up, it could be a new model altogether although the engine could be Toyota's 1.5l petrol engine seen on the Hyryder but in non-hybrid form.
Nitin Gadkari for long has been vocal about the benefits of flex-fuel cars and has urged car-makers to develop them a long time back.
A flex-fuel engine basically can run on more than one type of fuel in petrol along with ethanol. This type of engine is also able to run on either 100 per cent petrol or ethanol. Flex-fuel engines are very popular in other countries too like Brazil.
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The advantage of this type of engine is flexible usage where you can switch from pure petrol to ethanol. It is also a cleaner fuel along with being much cheaper too than pure petrol. The performance of flex-fuels is also similar to petrol engines hence, unlike a CNG, the performance does not go down.
This will help reduce emissions as well as our dependence on petrol/diesel along with making motoring cheaper too. A flex-fuel engine is not different from a regular petrol engine with minor changes to components like the fuel pump etc.
However, we are still yet to get regulations regarding this and more details but next year onwards we can expect some more car-makers to also show flex-fuel cars. Ethanol-blended gasoline would be available in some parts of the country from 2023 onwards too while a nationwide rollout will happen a few years later.
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