India has taken the most decisive step yet in a global scramble to redefine the future of automotive fuel, proposing formal rules to permit E85 and E100 blends — fuels containing up to 85% and nearly 100% ethanol respectively. The draft amendments to the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, opened for public comment this week, follow the country’s achievement of its 20% ethanol blending target in petrol and signal a determination to slash costly crude imports. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has doubled down on the move, telling manufacturers that the days of petrol and diesel vehicles are numbered and urging them to pivot toward hydrogen and ethanol as the primary alternatives. His blunt warning to original equipment manufacturers — that expanding fossil-fuel lineups is a recipe for obsolescence — underscores the political will behind New Delhi’s ambition to leapfrog straight to high-blend biofuels, even as the technical and logistical hurdles remain formidable.

Viewed from Washington, the picture is more fractured. A contentious amendment to the Farm Bill, backed by ethanol producers, farm machinery giants and the American Petroleum Institute, seeks to mandate year-round sales of E15 fuel — a 15% ethanol blend currently restricted in summer months due to volatility concerns. This has split the refining industry, pitting big operations against smaller ones that fear the rule would squeeze margins and accelerate a shift they are not ready for. The debate exposes the tension between agricultural interests, which see ethanol as a lifeline, and an oil sector struggling to adapt to diverging state-level mandates. Meanwhile, in New Delhi’s own backyard, the capital territory’s draft electric vehicle policy has drawn sharp criticism for offering purchase subsidies to affluent car buyers while doing little to discourage vehicle ownership or address the underlying scourges of congestion, road injuries and lost public space. Analysts in the region argue that simply swapping petrol engines for electric motors — or ethanol tanks — without reforming urban mobility risks perpetuating the same transport pathologies under a greener label.

Nowhere is that danger more palpable than in Mexico City, where chronic congestion has reached crisis velocity — average speeds of 17 km per hour and productivity losses exceeding 180 hours per person per year. Local policy experts there reject the reflex to expand road infrastructure, instead calling for demand management, public transport reinforcement, modal substitution and logistics reorganisation. Their diagnosis offers a sobering counterpoint to the fuel-centric narrative dominating India and the United States: that the real bottleneck is not the energy source but the very geometry of how people and goods move through cities. As governments in New Delhi and Washington rush to legislate higher ethanol blends, the danger is that these well-intentioned fuel policies become a distraction from the harder, more essential task of reshaping urban transport systems themselves. The forward-looking analysis must therefore reconcile the two agendas: biofuel mandates that reduce emissions from the tailpipe will achieve little if ever more vehicles — whatever they burn — continue clogging streets and choking the air. The next phase of the global fuel transition will be measured not by blend percentages, but by whether cities can simultaneously decarbonise their energy and decongest their roads.