Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Deep Fried Cars

Forget the Prius or the Insight or the Honda Civic hybrids. I want my alternative fuel car to run on vegetable oil, the kind that you use to deep fry twinkies and onion rings (what you've never had a deep-fried twinkie?).

My grandma, always the first to know of the latest technological innovations, told me she had heard about a company that was selling kits to convert your car so that it could run on vegetable oil for only $800. I did a quick search on google and found the website she was talking about.

The company, Greasecar, sells a self-install kit that converts your car to run on plain old vegetable oil. You don't even have to pay for the vegetable oil because most restaurants have to pay a disposal fee to get rid of the vegetable oil they use for frying. If you could find a good local restaurant that uses lots of cooking oil, you could convince them to give it to you for free to save them the hassle and all you would have to do is filter the oil. Assuming that you pay $100 in gas a month, the kit would pay for itself in 8 months.

I was almost ready to buy the kit when I realized that the kit can only be installed on diesel engine cars. Boooo! I knew I should have bought the diesel Jetta!

Most diesel cars available in the U.S. are either older models Mercedes, big pick up trucks, or newer Volkswagens. I definitely don't want an older car that will have to be in the shop all of the time, I am not necessarily a pick-up truck kind of gal, and even though I already own a Volkswagen, I don't think I could trade in my Jetta for a diesel version without acquiring more debt.

My deep fried car project will have to wait for now but as soon as I get out of debt and I have some savings, I'll be looking to trade my car for a car that will relieve me from being at the mercy of gas prices. And gas prices aside, wouldn't it be cool to tell people your car runs on cooking oil?

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that the Jeep Liberty can be purchased with a bio-diesel kit, and can even run on soybean oil. AND...you can get the Jeep Liberty in RED. Sounds like a good deal to me! :)

M.

Anonymous said...

They did this on an episode of Mythbusters, it looks like it would be disgusting to filter it.

Anonymous said...

Hum. Maybe I will get a deep fried house as well!

StePHen said...

isnt that incredible? i saw a story on it on the news last month. i was like "wow" and i just brought this up yesterday in my environmental science class. i wish they could convert non diesel cars!

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