I think methanol makes far more sense then ethanol. But basically you can cheaply build cars that can run on pretty much anything. It would be easy to require all cars to support everything from M10,E10 to M80,E80 without much issue.

I think 20-30 years ago cars should have started requiring cars to support all that stuff and allow competition between the different fuels and different methods of fuel production. Meaning most likely methanol from gas, ethnaol from food or gas from saudi arabia.

Methanol from natural gas could have been incredibly successful specially because natural gas export is not an easy problem. Meaning that gas prices in the US were incredibly cheap and a huge fleet of car hungry for methanol would have made it reasonable to do the conversion process. Far less methane could have been wasted into the air.

Now I feel like time has passed and EV make more sense.

The problem with ethanol is that the most efficient plants for making it also happen to be food crops.

That's only an issue if you assume that farm land is a limited resource but that not really the problem in practice.

There are no fuel shortages just because you have cars that use ethanol.

I'm not a huge fan of ethanol specially not how it was handled in the political process (farm subsides) but using it in general is not a bad idea if it can compete.

No, that's not the problem. The problem is that driving tractors and producing fertilizer requires a lot of fossil fuels.

You can run the tractors on ethanol also, though?

Everything is "carbon neutral" on a long enough time period. You can make ethanol carbon neutral on a one year time period if you want.