GM's E85 efforts are clearly being noticed, so much that even my biology teacher, who's this uber-liberal granola woman in her sixties, started talking about an Avalanche ad excitedly: "Wow, have you seen it?! I've always wanted a cute little truck; gosh, I'm going to buy one right away when we get an ethanol station. Are Chevy cars any good? They are? Good, as long as they're not Fords. I once nearly burned in a Ford...." and so on.
I refrained from breaking the news to her, that the Avalanche is hardly "cute" or "little", and that it gets 11 MPG city on E85. I can only imagine the disappointment when she and millions of other consumers find out. At the moment, the ads only mislead the sort of people who are interested in the ads in the first place.
So my question is, why doesn't GM produce any fuel-efficient FlexFuel vehicles for the environmentally conscious? Switching to alternative fuels is great, but focus should also be on reducing consumption, because even the water vapor coming out of a hydrogen vehicle is a greenhouse gas.
An Avalanche running on E85 still burns 205 gallons of foreign-sourced gasoline into the atmosphere annually, in addition to 1160 gallons of ethanol. I don't think that's what my biology teacher was expecting. And spreading agriculture, as would be required to run more cars on E85, is always destructive to ecosystems.
GM does not offer a vehicle for people who want to consume as little fuel and emit as few emissions as possible. They can change this by offering a FlexFuel Cobalt, HHR, or VUE, coupled to GM's BAS start-stop system. GM should offer compelling reasons for people to switch over from their unneccesarily gas-guzzling SUVs into smaller, more efficient cars.
What do you think? Why isn't this happening now, if all it takes are new fuel lines and some programming?