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You want to drive a car powered by the most reliable automobile engine ever produced , you want to burn non-petroleum fuel, yet you don't want to drive a boring ol' Mercedes sedan like every other anti-dinosaur-juice diesel demon in town? Loyal reader Vance has pulled our coat about this '67 Cougar with a freshly rebuilt turbo-equipped Mercedes-Benz OM617 installed; this setup looks like it was done right, though the price seems on the painful side and the performance is likely more tortoise than hare (albeit a tortoise that could win a 500,000-mile race with ease). [Craigslist Los Angeles] galleryPost('VeggieCougar', 6, 'Mercury Cougar Gets Mercedes Diesel Power');
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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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Need to find a station to fuel up you're Mercedes 300D with biodiesel? How about tips on how to prevent all that soy based fuel from gelling up when the hard freeze hits? Well now you can find out where all the professional hippy fuel buyers get their fix at Grassolean (it's funny cause they replaced the word gas with grass and came up with a clever wordplay version, see how they did that?). The site offers everything you need to know about the art and science of being a veganfueler. As an added bonus, the eco-warrior himself Bill O'Rielly interviews BFF Darryl Hannah about biodiesel in this clip from 2003, you can tell since Bill quotes LA gas prices that aren't a thousand dollars a gallon.
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We've been saying for years the only efficient hybrid with current technology is one mated to a diesel engine, and now it looks like another automaker is jumping into the conceptual fray. Our little news yesterday on the BMW Vision EfficientDynamics X5 -- translated from Bruce, that appears to be an X5 outfitted with a 2.0-liter twin turbo common rail diesel mild hybrid (wow, that's a mouthful, ain't it?) -- appears to be wholly true. BMW will be revealing this little concept in environmentally friendly CUV-ing at the Geneva Motor Show next month and they've now seen fit to reveal the rest of their press shots and the full press release, which we've got below the jump. Feel free to read through it if you're suffering from a strong desire to fall back into bed. For now, here's the gist of it -- hybrid + diesel + BMW = Over 100 HP per liter (total of 204 HP), 295 lb-ft of torque between 2000 and 2500 RPM. Exciting, isn't it? galleryPost('BMWVisionX5Geneva'...
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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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