Road tripping on E85

Via Think Progress, A group of guys from Kick the Oil Habit are going coast-to-coast in a flex-fuel car donated by Ford. Senator Barack Obama spoke at the send off and is a visible supporter of the campaign. Here's the first entry of the trip blog:

Life Is A Highway...

Submitted by Mark Pike on Wed, 2006-07-12 00:09. Map This

Welcome to the Kick the Oil Habit Road Trip blog! I am here in Washington, DC getting ready to head off on a cross country road trip in a sweet 2006 Ford Crown Victoria Flex-Fuel vehicle on loan from Ford (Thanks Ford!).

I've been planning this trip for a while and originally was gonna drive a regular gas-only powered car with two of my best buddies from college. We were going to hit up some baseball games, pick up hitchhikers, lose some money in Vegas (Red 27, baby!), burn a whole bunch of oil, and pollute the environment without thinking twice.

But then I heard about the KickTheOilHabit campaign and learned that there are literally millions of cars on the road today that are Flex-Fuel vehicles which means they can run either on regular dirty gasoline or clean burning, American made E85 fuel. I didn’t really know too much about it, but figured why not do the same exact trip, but use fuel that’s better for the environment?!

The only catch is that while there are millions of Flex-Fuel cars on the road in America today, there are only about 750 gas stations in the entire country that sell E85. With some careful plotting we figured that we could just barely make it across the country only stopping at E85 stations and after some convincing, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (my former employer) has decided to help me document our adventure on this blog and a video camera.

For the next 10 days we will be hopscotching from ethanol station to ethanol station learning about alternative energy sources and why there are so few E85 stations all the while burning a whole lot less oil than we would have and still having a whole lotta fun. Hopefully we’ll make it to the Pacific without running out of fuel.

So come along with us, track our progress on our nifty Google map, watch our daily videos on YouTube, post some questions to our blog and take a few minutes to help America Kick the Oil Habit!

Honk and say hello if you see us on the road!

http://www.kicktheoilhabit.org/roadtrip/node/1273