“That problem is already solved. Modern automobile gas tanks are sealed to the atmosphere when the gas cap is properly secured.”
I liked this part:
“Manufacturing a car as an FFV requires only the use of a corrosion-resistant fuel line and a change in the programming of the chip controlling the car’s electronic fuel injector. Thus FFVs can be produced—and currently are being produced in two dozen models, amounting to about 3 percent of total automobile sales in the United States—with essentially no price differential between them and comparable models that only use gasoline. As a result, there is no downside to making flex-fuel capability the standard. If it were required that all new cars sold in the United States had to be FFVs, there would be 50 million automobiles capable of burning methanol on the road in the U.S. within three years. Under such conditions, with methanol producible for a fraction of the cost of gasoline, the methanol pumps would appear soon enough, and the methanol economy envisioned by Olah and his collaborators would soon follow.”
I would have been the last to think that a government mandate was the answer, but I think Zubrin is right on this one. Flex-fuel capability costs next to nothing to add on the assembly line, so go ahead and mandate it for new cars. In a few years, when the cost of gasoline goes up even further, gas stations will then have incentive to install ethanol and/or methanol pumps.