The days of loud, obnoxious motorsport may well be coming to an end, with Honda announcing that they will be debuting their 100% ethanol powered V8 engines at the Gold Coast Indy race in October.

The ethanol engines use a plant-based fuel which burns cleanly with less air pollution, as opposed to the traditional methanol engines used by Indy cars. Yet they still manage to squeeze out the performance, with cars capable of hitting 160kph in less than three seconds.

Generally ethanol isn't considered to be a suitable replacement for fossil fuels as it requires vast amounts of plant life to convert into fuel, and that can eat into the plants being used to feed us. However, last year Honda uncovered a tech that can just convert the inedible bits of food into fuel, kind of like Mr Fusion in the Back To The Future II DeLorean (or not).

Hopefully we'll see this tech develop into the consumer (and time travel) space.

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