page_title: Flexible-fuel vehicle
section_title: Brazil
hierarchical_section_title: Flexible-fuel vehicle / Flexible-fuel vehicles by country / Brazil
caption_attribution_description: Typical Brazilian made dual-fuel (ethanol and gasoline) or full flex-fuel automobile models.
context_page_description: A flexible-fuel vehicle or dual-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, liquefied petroleum gas, 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, the United States, Canada, and Europe, led by Sweden.
context_section_description: Flexible-fuel technology started being developed by Brazilian engineers near the end of the 1990s. The Brazilian flexible fuel car is built with an ethanol-ready engine and one fuel tank for both fuels. The small gasoline reservoir for starting the engine in cold weather, used in earlier neat ethanol vehicles, was kept to avoid start up problems in the central and southern regions, where winter temperatures normally drop below 15 °C (59 °F). An improved flex motor generation was launched in 2009 and allowed to eliminate the need for this secondary gas reservoir tank. Another improvement was the reduction of fuel consumption and tailpipe emissions, between 10% to 15% as compared to flex motors sold in 2008. In March 2009 Volkswagen do Brasil launched the Polo E-Flex, the first flex fuel model without an auxiliary tank for cold start.
  A key innovation in the Brazilian flex technology was avoiding the need for an additional dedicated sensor to monitor the ethanol-gasoline mix, which made the first American M85 flex fuel vehicles too expensive.
  Brazilian flex cars are capable of running on just hydrated ethanol (E100), or just on a blend of gasoline with 25 to 27% anhydrous ethanol (the mandatory blend), or on any arbitrary combination of both fuels.
  The flexibility of Brazilian FFVs empowers the consumers to choose the fuel depending on current market prices. As ethanol fuel economy is lower than gasoline because of ethanol's energy content is close to 34% less per unit volume than gasoline, flex cars running on ethanol get a lower mileage than when running on pure gasoline. However, this effect is partially offset by the usually lower price per liter of ethanol fuel. As a rule of thumb, Brazilian consumers are frequently advised by the media to use more alcohol than gasoline in their mix only when ethanol prices are 30% lower or more than gasoline, as ethanol price fluctuates heavily depending on the result of seasonal sugar cane harvests.
  In March 2003 Volkswagen do Brasil launched in the market the Gol 1.6 Total Flex, the first commercial flexible fuel vehicle capable of running on any blend of gasoline and ethanol. GM do Brasil followed three months later with the Chevrolet Corsa 1.8 Flexpower, using an engine developed by a joint-venture with Fiat called PowerTrain. Passenger flex-fuel vehicles became a commercial success in the country, and as of December 2013, a total of 15 car manufacturers produce flex-fuel engines for the Brazilian market, dominating all light vehicle segments except sports cars, off-road vehicles and minivans.
  The production of flex-fuel cars and light commercial vehicles  since 2003 reached the milestone of 10 million vehicles in March 2010. At the end of 2012 registrations of flex-fuel cars and light trucks represented 87% of all passenger and light duty vehicles sold in the country in 2012, and climbed to a 94% market share of all new passenger vehicles sales in 2013. Production passed the 20 million-unit mark in June 2013. 
  By the end of 2014, flex-fuel cars represented 54% of the Brazilian registered stock of light-duty vehicles, while gasoline only vehicles represented 34.3%. As of June 2015, flex-fuel light-duty vehicle sales totaled 25.5 million units. The market share of flex vehicles reached 88.6% of all light-duty registrations in 2017. As of March 2018, fifteen years after the launch of the first flex fuel car, there were 30.5 million flex cars and light trucks registered in the country, and 6 million flex motorcycles.
  The rapid success of flex vehicles was made possible by the existence of 33,000 filling stations with at least one ethanol pump available by 2006, a heritage of the early Pró-Álcool ethanol program. These facts, together with the mandatory use of E25 blend of gasoline throughout the country, allowed Brazil in 2008 to achieve more than 50% of fuel consumption in the gasoline market from sugar cane-based ethanol.
  According to two separate research studies conducted in 2009, at the national level 65% of the flex-fuel registered vehicles regularly used ethanol fuel, and the
caption: Six typical flex-fuel models from several Brazilian carmakers, popularly known as "flex" cars, that run on any blend of hydrous ethanol (E100) and E20-E25 gasoline.
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