Is E-15 as dangerous as stated in this video:
Absolutely.
I have several friends who converted their race cars to E85 because you can make more power if tuned properly. One problem is that Alcohol will attract moisture, so unless you have a plastic fuel tank and SS fuel lines you will rot out your fuel systems. My friends with older cars had to replace their entire fuel systems and had to re-tune their cars as an engine requires twice the volume of E85 to make more power than pump gas (93 octane). I run 40Lb/Hr injectors, and if I was to switch to E85 I would have to run 76Lb/Hr injectors. You get a lot less fuel mileage on ethanol.
The other problem is that your engine does not know that is is running on ethanol as opposed to gasoline unless it has ways of detecting it and changing the fuel/spark tables in the tune on the fly (FlexFuel vehicles) Unless you have a direct injection engine, which have become more common in recent years the way your car figures out how much fuel to add is using a MAF (Mass Air Flow) sensor. This is located on your intake usually directly after the filter. It measures the amount of O2 passing through it and adjust the amount of fuel added. If the engine thinks its running on regular gasoline, it will only ask for the standard injector pulse width of fuel. Since we know that you need more Alcy than Gas to produce the power your engine is now not supplying enough fuel. This causes the combustion mixture to go lean, a lean mixture burns hotter, the cylinder develops hot spots, fuel ignites before the spark goes off, this is called “pinging” or “detonation” and WILL destroy an engine in short order.
I don’t know if E15 is any more dangerous that E85 seeing as how we run E10 now at a minimum. My race car had to be retuned when the fuel change happened because I refuse to pay $8 a gallon for 100 or 104 octane race fuels. Any car that is not a FlexFuel vehicle should avoid gasoline with more than the standard 10% ethanol
Running E85 is perfectly safe if your tuner knows what he is doing. Getting larger injectors/fuel pump and installing a flex fuel sensor goes a long way in protecting your motor.