E20 Fuel Issue: Here’s What Bajaj Suggests For BS3 And BS4 Bikes

Is E20 going to ruin your old bike? Will you have to scrap it off? What about your old memories? Well, Bajaj officials have suggested one solution. And at the face of it, it seems pretty simple. Add a fuel cleaning additive to a full tank every 1000 km. This is sort of similar to the days when you had to mix fuel and a little bit of 2T oil into the fuel tank of a two-stroke machine but the reasoning here is very different.

Bajaj claims that the main issue that will arise with the use of E20 fuel in an old BS3 bike (like a 2013 KTM 390 Duke that Acko Drive’s Arun Nadar owns) is the gumming up inside the fuel tank, injectors and combustion chamber, all places where you don’t want anything to go catastrophic. Hence, adding a fuel cleaning additive, roughly 80-100 ml for 10 litres of fuel, should get rid of these deposits.

The suggestion is to add these cleaning additives every 1000 km and when you have a full tank. The Indian mentality of filling just ₹100 or ₹500 worth of fuel will not work for this to succeed. A full tank is necessary. And say it costs around ₹1000 for a full tank for a motorcycle, then you would have to shell out an additional ₹40-₹400 for the fuel additive.

And this still doesn’t solve the matter of the pipes and hoses corroding. A move from rubber to metal-braided lines will be necessary in the long run. Hence, while you will be able to ride your bike and maintain its health via the additives, there would be a sizeable tune-up job for you in the future. What remains to be seen is the performance impact of the E20 fuels on the high-strung engines that KTM makes as one buys an orange mean machine for its raw and engaging performance.