Flexible-fuel vehicle
vehicle with an internal combustion engine designed to run on more than one fuel
A flexible-fuel vehicle (FFV) or dual-fuel vehicle (colloquially called a flex-fuel vehicle) is an alternative fuel vehicle with an internal combustion engine designed to run on more than one fuel, usually gasoline blended with either ethanol or methanol fuel, and both fuels are stored in the same common tank. Modern flex-fuel engines are capable of burning any proportion of the resulting blend in the combustion chamber as fuel injection and spark timing are adjusted automatically according to the actual blend detected by a fuel composition sensor. Flex-fuel vehicles are distinguished from bi-fuel vehicles, where two fuels are stored in separate tanks and the engine runs on one fuel at a time, for example, compressed natural gas (CNG), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), or hydrogen.
The most common commercially available FFV in the world market is the ethanol flexible-fuel vehicle, with about 60 million automobiles, motorcycles and light duty trucks manufactured and sold worldwide by March 2018, and concentrated in four markets, Brazil (30.5 million light-duty vehicles and over 6 million motorcycles), the United States (27 million by the end of 2021), Canada (1.6 million by 2014), and Europe, led by Sweden (243,100). In addition to flex-fuel vehicles running with ethanol, in Europe and the US, mainly in California, there have been successful test programs with methanol flex-fuel vehicles, known as M85 flex-fuel vehicles. There have been also successful tests using P-series fuels with E85 flex fuel vehicles, but as of September 2025, this fuel is not yet available to the general public. These successful tests with P-series fuels were conducted on Ford Taurus and Dodge Caravan flexible-fuel vehicles.
Though technology exists to allow ethanol FFVs to run on any mixture of gasoline and ethanol, from pure gasoline up to 100% ethanol (E100), North American and European flex-fuel vehicles are optimized to run on E85, a blend of 85% anhydrous ethanol fuel with 15% gasoline. This upper limit in the ethanol content is set to reduce ethanol emissions at low temperatures and to avoid cold starting problems during cold weather, at temperatures lower than 11 °C (52 °F). The alcohol content is reduced during the winter in regions where temperatures fall below 0 °C (32 °F) to a winter blend of E70 in the U.S. or to E75 in Sweden from November until March.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Flexible-fuel vehicle” is vehicle with an internal combustion engine designed to run on more than one fuel. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Flexible-fuel, vehicle and internal, not as a finished interpretation.
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