Kids Build Soybean Fueled Sports Car

Sterling D. Allan writes "High school students from West Philadelphia High School have designed a sports car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon on soy bean oil. CBS News reports that this unlikely car was the star last week at the Philadelphia Auto Show. Once again, are we seeing the fabled instance of revolutionary technology coming not from the big corporations, but from some unlikely garage. Maybe these guys will open source their design."

Comments

Re:cost of fuel

[sumdumass]

Trying to run the world off soybeans is an invitation to slash and burn the rain forest for farmland and kill everything in the rivers with fertilizer.

We don't need to run the world off of soybeans. We just need to release a presence of it enough to bring other fuel costs down.

It is a "glue" until alternative means (solar,nuclear,hydrogen,whatever..) can be built into the econemy. If we were to go completley (fossil)oil free today, there are so many cars and other machines that would be useless our econemy and possibly civilization would colapse. Soy oil and ethyl alcohols could keep these machines going until we can replace them with differently fueled vehicle or machines. The average car will last around 15+ years. After about 5 the first owner usualy gets rid of it and it changes hands until some poor sap gets it and it is the best they can afford and the cycle continues. After about 25 years, the car is probably scraped, recycled or preserved in some fasion were the transition from one type fuel to another totaly non dependent oil could be resonably done.

One of the most interesting parts of this article is the mention of sportscar and 50 mpg in the same sentence. Most if not all production diesel (soy bean oil's substitute)powered cars get less then 46 mpg. Some don't even get 25mpg if you count the trucks. Diesel fuel is said to have a higher amount of stored energy and is considered more efficient then soy oil. This same system getting 50mpg in soy might lend diesel fueled car the ability to get 60+mpg while still retaining performance.

Re:Food-as-fuel

[spun]

As one of the people involved in this fiasco, let me fill in the details. The group is called Food-Not-Bombs. When I worked with them, we would get donations from supermarkets, wholesale food distributors and bagel shops. We would take the food to volunteer's kitchens and cook soup, usually around 15 gallons. Then we would take it to city hall or the UN plaza and feed people. Right in public where the tourists could see them. Frank Jordan, San Francisco's mayor of the time, was trying to sweep the homeless under the rug. So he was pretty pissed about the whole thing.

What they said was, you can't serve food in public without a permit. And, by the by, they did away with the permit process. Oh, you could still feed people in public if you had a permit, but no one could get one. We kept doing it anyway. So he called in the special squads.

I've watched these goons slam my friends into the ground and drag them off by their hair. For feeding people. They dumped the soup in the gutter, in front of all the hungry people. They poured bleach on the bagels. So we got creative. We would stage five or six fake servings, and while they were hassling the people with the empty buckets, the real serving would go on quietly. Or we would stand in the fountain and serve. The cops hate to get wet.

There were plenty of cameras. I still have tapes. I could show you one where they slam this cute little 5'1" girl down onto the pavement and stand on her back while cuffing her hands behind her, then nearly dislocating her shoulders dragging her off by the cuffs. Fun stuff, but oddly none of the monied interests that own the media had any desire to show those videos.

Sure, there was a big backlash against dear old Frank, and some people even credit the bruhaha for helping get someone else elected. Unfortunately, that someone was Willy Brown, a slick machine Democrat who knew that if he just made things very difficult without actually using the sort of over the top fascist antics that Jordan had, eventually the silly hippies would get bored and go chain themselves to trees somewhere, which is exactly what happened. At the height of Jordan's repression, Food not Bombs served twice a day. Last time I checked, they were serving twice a week.