Sheetz Is Selling E85 for $1.85 per Gallon, Provided Your Car Can Actually Use It
E85, Flex Fuel, Cheap Race Gas, whatever you call it, is cheap at Sheetz. But check your cap before you start filling grocery bags.
It’s time to party like it’s 2005. Well, at least for some of us. This week, regional gas station giant Sheetz announced it would cut the price of a gallon of E85 down to $1.85 until the end of April, which represents a saving of about 51 cents per gallon, according to E85prices.com.
Before sprinting to your nearest Sheetz to fill up on that cheap, sweet light crude—presumably, you live somewhere near the Mid-Atlantic states where Sheetz operates most of its stores—you should check that owner’s manual to see if your car is compatible with E85, which is a heavy ethanol blend with gasoline. And by heavy, we mean it; it’s up to 85% ethanol, which is way more than the usual 10% found at most pumps—if there’s any ethanol blended in the gas at all.
E85, sometimes called Flex Fuel, can be nasty stuff in cars not prepared for the fuel. That’s because ethanol can quickly erode and eat away rubber seals in fuel lines and corrode aluminum, which requires Flex Fuel-compatible vehicles to have specialized fuel lines and tanks. Domestic manufacturers such as General Motors and Ford have made E85-compatible cars and trucks for a while, although those offerings have massively dwindled to just four 2023 model-year vehicles: certain versions of the Chevy Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500, Ford F-150, and Ford Explorer. The fuel gained mainstream traction in the U.S. in the 2000s for its independence from Middle Eastern countries and a loophole in CAFE regulations that favored the fuel type. (You can also partly thank Iowa’s early presidential primary, too.)
Besides giving Midwest farmers something to grow, E85 is pretty much budget race gas. High-performance vehicles such as the Koenigsegg Jesko reach their peak on E85 blend because of its higher-octane rating than premium fuel, and the recently announced Dodge Demon 170 is designed to run on the corn-based fuel, too. If you don’t have either one of those cars—it’s OK, not many people do—go outside and check to see if your fuel filler cap is yellow. If so, and you live near a Sheetz, enjoy the cheap stuff while it lasts.
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