Gadgetory

I'm Brian Cooley from CNET on cars taking some of your emails about high-tech cars and modern driving and this one comes in from Ellie II who says if turbos are so great we talk about them a lot around here why are they not standard on just about every new car by now what would it take to install one also he says could you please explain flex-fuel okay Ellie so turbos are an amazing technology to get more power more efficiently out of typically a smaller engine is how they're often being used today the thing with turbos though is adding them is not trivial even for a car maker with all their resources adding a turbocharger to an existing engine design is going to add some cost because the turbo itself is a very complex highly machined mechanism and it's got a lot of plumbing that goes around it it also adds a certain amount of complexity to the design and to what you're trying to shoehorn into the engine bay it's a lot of additional gear that is external to the engine itself and know that an automaker cannot just stick a turbo on a current engine and say good it's running there's a lot of R&D and testing and engineering and recertification to be done before that goes into a production line of cars and everything is done at big scale in the auto biz so they don't onesie twosie things or big projects so that's one of the things around turbochargers now there are add-on kits out there a lot of them for late-model cars you didn't mention what you drive but let's assume it's something made in the last few years you may very well find an add-on turbo kit for it they typically cost in the few thousand dollars range and also make sure you've got some good guarantees in there because these are elaborate pieces of gear that spin at very high rpms and make sure the kit you buy does promised to be regulatory compliant in the state where you're gonna be installing it and driving your car now in terms of flex fuel that means a world of three things that gasoline engine cars can run of course there's gasoline that's the main fuel there's a 15 which is 15 percent ethanol which is corn alcohol basically and the main flex fuel people think about at the pump is 85 this is 85 percent ethanol typically corn alcohol and 15 percent gasoline that's a very different mix for a car to run on so when you buy a flex-fuel car it does several things to allow it to digest that diet including a change in the ignition timing because there is a far higher octane to e85 than to gas Selene secondly you change the fuel flow mapping because you get more fuel into the engine to get the same amount of power when you're running on e85 and thirdly you have to make sure the materials in the engine are suitable to be exposed to ethanol alcohol which is a very different chemical of course than gasoline those are the main three things that constitute a flex-fuel car