Our family of five likes to camp. We purchased a 2004 Yukon XL (the boy mover) to pull our pop up camper. We purchased the boy mover right before we started paying attention to gas prices in December 2004. We stopped on the way home from the dealership to fill up and were shocked that is was over $65.00 to fill up the beast. How were we going to afford to drive this monster?
In the next few years the price to fill up has sometimes reached $90.00. But we love camping, have 3 active boys and need (and are used to) the space our car provides.
Then an interesting happened early this past fall. Our local tv station ran a story on E85 fuel and how you may be driving a flex fuel car and not even know it. I probably just came home from filling up the beast when the story aired because I paid particulary close attention. I went to the website and looked up my car. Then I checked again. I filled up another time or two with good old fashioned high price gas. I spoke to my mechanic-savy brother in law, he said I had better be really sure because I could ruin the engine and he thought it would say "flex fuel" on my car if it truly was. So I looked up the link again and rechecked. Sure enough my car was listed. I have the right character in the Vin number.
I loaded up my environmentally conscience 4th grader for our first trip to the E85 pump. I told him what a great thing we were doing for the world to fuel up our gas hog boy mover with E85 fuel. We paid 2.19 a gallon! And we have continued to only fuel with E85. There is a slight drop in gas mileage, maybe 15-20%. But we are saving over 15-20% so it all works out.
Today I filled up the boy mover and it was only $2.09 a gallon. I was so excited to only pay $65.00 to fill it up.
To check if your car is a flex fuel, check out this website: http://www.e85fuel.com/e85101/flexfuelvehicles.php
To find out more on E85, try this one:
http://www.e85.us/index.html
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