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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, we saw a cat-piss-enhanced, meth-head-damaged, Camaro-suspended '53 Chevy take a beating in the Choose Your Eternity poll at the hands of the Jaguar-powered, bugs-in-face customized '51 Chevy. But you ask me, all these internal-combustion vehicles are getting a trifle monotonous . We need to change things up today, by looking at a pair of ex ternal-combustion vehicles. Yes, steam-powered cars! Thanks (and a PCH Tipster T-shirt) go to dwegmull for finding these cars for us. My initial plan was to call today's challenge the "PCH Cleveland Steamer Edition," but that's just too easy , plus neither of the cars is anywhere near Cleveland... then the Toots & The Maytals song (above) got stuck in my head. So, Pressure Drop Edition it is. There's nothing more macho than driving a vehicle that can have a boiler explosion...
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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, we saw the triple-'49-Mercury deal obliterate the six-four by what may be the biggest-ever margin in Choose Your Eternity Poll history: 80-20 for the Mercuries in the Low And Slow Edition poll. Today we've become so excited over the possibility that the $30,000 $40,000 Chevy Volt will be on the street in the not-so-distant future that we're going electric, and we're not talking about golf carts or even AMCs here- no, we mean electric vintage European sports cars! Say your '73 Porsche 911, which you bought brand-new, failed to pass the Washington smog test 17 years later. Would you break out the wrenches and make it pass... or would you convert it to electric power? Exactly! And that's what the owner of this 1973 Porsche 911T did, installing electric motor, batteries, the works. We may have to dock some PCH points here for...
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We had another close race down the highway to the Lake of Fire yesterday, with the so-called win going to the triple helping of '55 Austin FX3 cabs in the Choose Your Eternity poll. Today, however, I'm inspired by the big drums of used tempura-frying oil I saw waiting for disposal behind the Japanese take-out joint near my house; think of all that potential carbon-neutral fuel just sitting there, waiting for some enterprising sort to put together a veggie-oil diesel machine to burn it up! Actually, what we really want is a diesel that runs on liposuction fat harvested from cosmetic surgeons- imagine the sheer coolness of driving a car that runs on human flesh - but the next best thing is a project fueled by your soul! First of all, we have a hard time getting really enthusiastic about a veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benz diesel, because that's what 99.9% of veggie-oil-burnin' types are running- if you're going to go to the trouble of converting your vehicle to burn weird...
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The French car beat the German one in our last Choose Your Eternity matchup , which means we need to give France's cross-Channel rival an opportunity to snatch the PCH Trophy (which features several rods hanging out the side and a spreading pool of oil below) today. We're going with something a bit different this time, however; ever since the What Should Mad_Science Drive To Work QOTD, we've been thinking about non-petroleum-fueled car projects. Not boring ol' electric cars that can barely buzz up to highway speed, or seen-one-ya-seen-em-all veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benzes, though. Something fun! Something... HELL! There's no law that says you have to run dinosaur juice in your diesel; vegetable oil or animal fat works just fine! Oh sure, some worrywarts will tell you that you need to use some kind of witches' brew of methanol, lye, and who-knows-what-all and make actual biodiesel, but that's only if you want to run the stuff in an unmodified diesel engine...
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We took a break from the PCH Superpowers and watched the Rotary Honda 600 pound on the Rotary Starlet in yesterday's all-Japanese Choose Your Eternity poll . However, Britain's defeat of Italy last week can mean only one thing: Britain must now take on PCH SuperGigaPower France in an attempt to claim the rusty, oil-leaking PCH Intergalactic Superchampion crown! Why the heck didn't Jaguar put truck beds on their cars straight from the factory? Take the XJ-S, for instance: V12 torque, comfy leather interior, beautiful lines- in short, everything you want in a cartruck! Obviously, it falls to the Jaguar owner to deal with this shortcoming. Those of you who have been planning to build your own XJ-Schero can save many months of hard work by starting with this Rancheroized 1990 Jaguar XJ-S as the basis of your project. For some inexplicable reason, this car failed to sell for the chump-change price of two grand, and that means the seller is likely ready to deal! The seller, clearly...
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We see the Omni GLH has pulled ahead of the Porsche 924 Turbo by a 60-40 margin in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , but what we aren't seeing is the big picture. As in, holy crap, the oil is running out! Yes, the wells were pumping, pumping, all thatcha like, but now we need to start thinking about what we'll be driving in a post-global-socio-econo-nihilo no-more-cheap-oil sorta world. We don't want to give up on internal combustion, and we just gotta have forced induction, so it would seem the easiest choice would be turbocharged diesel cars made to run on vegetable oil and/or animal fat (you killjoys who want to gripe about how you still need the petroleum-fueled gears of society to keep a-spinnin' to produce such oils can just go suspend your disbelief, in the same way you need to suspend your disbelief about the impossibility of actually finishing a Hell Project). Many of you are probably thinking you'd go with a Mercedes-Benz turbodiesel for your bacon...
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We're not really surprised that the goat-damaged Torino fastback trounced the Katrina Special Road Runner in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll ; after all, it's not fair to put a Malaise Era car up against a 60s fastback. Today we're going to get...
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