After Delhi NCR, E85 Flex Fuel Now Available In Mumbai: Don't Use It On Regular Cars, 2 Wheelers
E85 fuel is available in Mumbai at Rs 91.18 per litre. Regular petrol in the city currently costs Rs 111.33 per litre. That is a saving of over Rs 20 per litre at the pump, which sounds immediately useful. The catch is a hard one: E85 cannot be used in a standard petrol car. It requires a flex-fuel vehicle, a machine built with different fuel system components and a separate engine calibration to handle 85 per cent ethanol content. Filling a regular petrol car with E85 will damage it.
Mumbai joins Delhi-NCR as one of the first cities where E85 is commercially available. The fuel was launched nationally on June 5, 2026, initially across 48 retail outlets of public sector oil marketing companies. The government's target is to scale to 500 outlets by December 2026 and 5,000 outlets by December 2027, covering Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, and Nagpur in the first phase.
E85 is a blend of 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent petrol. Ethanol is produced domestically from sugarcane and maize, which makes it structurally cheaper to produce at scale compared to refined petrol that depends on imported crude oil.
The lower price of E85 reflects its lower calorific value: ethanol contains less energy per litre than petrol, so it costs less to produce the fuel but also delivers fewer kilometres per litre in a vehicle.
The practical arithmetic works like this. If a flex-fuel car delivers, say, 15 kmpl on E20 petrol, the same car on E85 will likely return 10 to 12 kmpl because of the energy content difference, a reduction of roughly 20 to 25 per cent.
At Rs 91.18 per litre versus Rs 111.33, E85 is 18 per cent cheaper per litre. The cost-per-kilometre advantage is narrower than the per-litre price gap suggests, and in some real-world scenarios may not produce a saving at all, depending on how the vehicle's E85 fuel efficiency compares against its E20 performance.
The Maruti Suzuki WagonR BioFlex, launched earlier in 2026 and priced at Rs 7.24 lakh, is one of the very few vehicles currently on sale that is certified to run on blends from E20 up to E100. Hero MotoCorp has flex-fuel variants of the Splendor+ and HF Deluxe, both compatible with E20 to E85 blends. Beyond these, the flex-fuel vehicle market in this country is essentially empty for now. No other mainstream car or two-wheeler is currently certified to run on E85.
For the overwhelming majority of petrol vehicle owners, E85 is not an option. E20 remains the standard fuel at most pumps and is compatible with all petrol vehicles manufactured for BS6 compliance.
The vehicle side of the equation needs to catch up with the fuel side. E85 dispensing infrastructure is now being built out, but the number of vehicles capable of using it is in the low thousands. Until a meaningful range of E85-compatible cars, SUVs, and two-wheelers is available across price points, the fuel will remain a pilot programme with limited real-world uptake.
The government has noted that CAFE III regulations, due in April 2027, will factor ethanol-capable vehicles into automaker emissions calculations, which creates a regulatory push for more flex-fuel models.
If that results in widespread E85-compatible launches across Maruti, Hyundai, Tata, and Hero's mainstream line-ups over the next two to three years, the infrastructure being built today will actually have vehicles to serve.