As yet I haven’t had to fill up the bio-ethanol car – it came with a full tank! But I have been looking at where to go when I do need to.

My dealer in Bad Homburg will probably be my usual port of call – the petrol pump is key-operated so I can go there anytime and get sent a monthly bill which should be very convenient.

But looking further afield, the site e85.biz has a downloadable directory of bio-ethanol petrol stations.

The list currently has 91 entries for Germany – I’ve already downloaded it to my Palm to be able to take it with me – the first thing I noticed was that there are lots of independent petrol stations or smaller chaines – the larger ones are conspicuous by their absence.

If a large car manufacturer like Ford can make the cars to run on bio-ethanol, surely the major petroleum chains can put it on their forecourts?

And unless I’m very much mistaken, none of the ones on the list are located on a motorway that I use regularly.

So what do I plan to do? Well, fill up before I go for one thing, and maybe put enough normal petrol into get home again. If I’m staying somewhere then I will find out where the nearest bio-ethanol petrol station is and go there if it’s not too much of a detour, but at the moment I don’t think I’d leave the motorway to find one situated in an area that I’m not familiar with.

Today I had the chance to try out the cruise control on the bio-ethanol Ford Focus. This maybe has less to do with the fuel in the tank, but it is still something that I have always been very wary of.

In fact, I associate it with the signs on the Brussels ring road where it is not allowed!

Anyway, all went fine – although I’m still worried that I have less control over the car whilst using it, even if that’s not really the case.

My route this morning took me over the motorway and the Bad Homburg ring road, and my fuel consumption stayed pretty much the same.

This evening I was in Bad Homburg and parked at the Kurhaus. I was curious as to whether I would smell the ethanol when I stopped the car in the underground car park, but I didn’t notice anything.

I’ve like to try out the petrol station, but there are still around 400km left to do first!

Well, sort of day two really as I didn’t go anywhere yesterday.

This morning I went to Frankfurt on the motorway and was able to test the accelaration properly – I am more than impressed and I think it was even smoother and faster than my last car (maybe because the engine is a bit more powerful anyway).

This afternoon I had to go to Friedrichsdorf which took me through the middle of Bad Homburg. Again, apart from being a bit more powerful there I don’t think I could have told that bio-ethanol was in the tank if I didn’t actually know.

I managed to stall a couple of times on the car park, however. As it was 15°C I don’t think this can be down to the cold we had the rest of the week. Maybe it was me being too careful?

I have done just over 100km and that has used about 1/4 of the tank apparently, the board computer tells me that I have 500km left (the tank is currently filled just with E85 bio-ethanol and not yet mixed with normal petrol). This works out at 12l/100km, which is 23.5 mpg (UK) or 19.6 mpg (US). [Here is a useful conversion calculator]

A while ago in the Monday Podcast we talked about buying and registering cars in Germany.

In particular we discuss which paperwork is needed and the procedures involved, based on our own experiences.

Although the bio-ethanol car was registered by the dealer, you might still find the podcast interesting:

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