Factory made Volvo 855 Bi- Fuel

[MatDesign84]

Did you guys know about this?
Volvo 855 Bi-Fuel


I would love to make mine this way, anyone know how or have a PDF?

[jimmy57]

Volvo bi-fuels of that era are CNG or gasoline. There may be some other second fuels but they were gaseous or liquified gaseous fuels as the second fuel besides gasoline.
There were tax benefits for a while in many European countries.
The downside was the extra consumption of the secondary fuel.
IF you spent $500 making your car a bi-fuel (it would be WAY more than that) you'd likely see no ROI.

[billofdurham]

In the UK we have many companies converting all makes of petrol powered vehicles to run on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). My son owns a 1991 Talbot Express motor home that was converted before he bought it. It weighs in at just under 3 tons and has a puny 2000cc engine pulling it around. Running on petrol he usually achieves 23mpg and running on LPG he usually achieves 22mpg. However, as LPG is about half the price of petrol per litre, we can say he is achieving about 40mpg on price.

I have also dabbled with LPG power having acquired a Jeep Grand Cherokee last year. Again it was converted to LPG before I bought it. I was returning about 20mpg on both petrol and LPG making the latter, on price, about 40mpg. When I sold it, on eBay, I had a queue of potential buyers wanting to see it and sold it for just over £200 more than I paid for it.

Conversion costs, depending on who does the work, range from £1500 to £2345 so it takes quite a high annual mileage to make the cost profitable. In Central London we have a "congestion charge", having to pay to go into the centre of the city with a vehicle. LPG powered vehicles are exempt from this charge because of their low emissions.

Bill.

[jimmy57]

The problem in the US is the price of the gaseous fuels is so close to the same as gasoline. The price break in Europe is the tax. In the US the tax is more or less $.50/gallon so if the tax is removed totally you have $3.50 fuel instead of $4 fuel. Taking in just the MPG penalty you end up back at $3.75 per unit or maybe higher.
Then there is the whole where do you fuel it issue.

[billofdurham]

$4.00 for a gallon, how good is that? At present ours stands at £6.13 or $9.97 at today's exchange rate. Allowing for your gallon being slightly smaller than ours it works out at $8.31.

Our fuel duty stands at £2.63 on a UK gallon but we also pay 20% on top of that for Value Added Tax. We actually pay a tax on a tax, how's that for double dealing off the bottom of the pack?

LPG costs less than petrol because a politician promised that it will remain at, or near, half the price of petrol. We have had this type of promise before when we were encouraged to buy diesel powered vehicles "because diesel fuel will always be lower than petrol". Three years after that promise the price of diesel passed that of petrol and now stands about 18 pence a gallon more. Not a great deal but it showed yet again that politicians promises can't be believed.

As for where to refuel. We have several filling stations near us that do sell LPG. Also most converters have the ability to supply it. Shell promised several years ago that every Shell station in the UK would have LPG available in about two years. Obviously the person who made that promise was practising to become a politician. There are large gaps in the distribution network as I found when I went to Scotland with my Jeep. The West coast has a reasonable network of LPG stations but the East coast has virtually nothing north of the River Forth. In fact I bought my Jeep from someone in Inverness as he had to make an 80 mile round trip to refuel after Shell closed the only filling station with LPG.

Believe me, we don't have tax breaks on road fuel in the UK. Of the total price for a gallon of fuel the % of the cost that is tax is: petrol 60%; diesel and LPG 58%.

Bill.