Comments on: Coffee, You Can Drive My Car

By: Nicole

Nicole — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:32:00 +0000

I love my Golf TDI. Aside from the low clearance which makes off-roading hard, its gets amazing fuel mileage, it is fun to drive, and has great little features you’d never think of – just wait until you get to use the tire change kit! You can’t put vegetable oil directly in the TDI like you can with the old diesels. The injectors are too narrow or something like that. You can put diesel made from veg oil, however.

I bought mine because I really needed a cost efficient car and I wanted a hatchback. I calculated the purchase cost, fuel, repair, and resale costs and determined that this car is more economical than anything else on the market.

My car is 5 years old and it has only lost 5k of the original value!

By: Emily

Emily — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:14:00 +0000

so, just wondering, if cars ran on coffee byproducts, would the highways smell good? Woud a car drive past you on your morning walk or whatever and would the smell wake you up like in Foldgers ads?

By: Dawn

Dawn — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 02:12:00 +0000

How about biofuel from algae? I’ve seen a link or two in the Weekend Links post. Would love to see a full blog-post on it.

By: Jason!

Jason! — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:26:00 +0000

I think it’s a good to get as much biodiesel out of a byproduct we just throw away if we can. However, I agree that the possible yield we could get out of coffee grounds is questionable.

I personally think algae fuel is a better biofuel option, better than corn anyway. Higher yield and doesn’t affect food stock as much as using corn (I don’t know anyone that eats algae).

By: Beth

Beth — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:41:00 +0000

I have a 2006 Jetta TDI and a number of other people at work have diesel VW’s of various years as well. We have talked about alternative fuels. The only thing you need to keep in mind is when you switch from regular diesel to something else you need to change the fuel filter immedietly after and every time you change between fuel types. The reason is the different impurities in the fuel and the gunk in the tank and lines.

Bio diesel will remove all the sludge and build up in your egine and tank and lines created by regular diesel thus clogging all the filters up so to get optimum performance all the filters need to be changes (and none of the filters are cheap). So unless you are never going to drive across country or you know where every bio diesel station is in the area you are almost better off sticking with regular until the bio becomes more prevelant.

Plus to run something other than regular or bio diesel in the car you will need to make some minor modifications to the engine that will take it out of warrenty. Once ours is out of warrenty we are going to seriously consider making that switch. There are a number of web sites to explore on this topic.

FYI make sure to replace the fuel filter every 3 oil changes, you will notice a huge difference in acceleration and performance with new fuel filter.

BTW driving highway (long trips) we can get better than 50 mpg driving about 80mph – about 720 miles. city driving seems to average about 45mpg or 600 miles (we have a manual) – we basically need to fill up only every 2 weeks and as the tank is about 12 gallons at most even at the worst the gas prices were, we only spent about $100 a month on gas. If you put lots of mileage on a car this would be one I would choose again.

By: Shannon

Shannon — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:56:00 +0000

I ordered a TDI in August for all the same reasons you cite in this article. The dealership called me two weeks ago and said it will be another 6 months before it comes in. After a few rounds on the phone, they agreed to return my deposit.

Sadly, I’ll never get my coffee-powered Jetta. Any other suggestions for a similar car?

By: Kels

Kels — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:29:00 +0000

My boyfriend owns a 2004 Jetta that runs on diesel. When he purchased it, gas and diesel prices were comparable, and the fuel economy of the car made it very appealing. Fast forward less than a year later where diesel prices jumped over a dollar higher than gas, and suddenly the cost effectiveness of it went out the window. But considering he can drive twice the mileage on the same size tank as my 25 mpg car is pretty nice. And being nice to the environment is pretty good too :)

But be warned – oil changes are expensive (but can be done on your own if you know what you are doing) and make sure you are on good terms with the dealership or have a good mechanic, because the German engineering makes it a little more difficult to find someone qualified to fix them.

By: kat

kat — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:55:00 +0000

I love this idea! In Brazil they use sugar cane to make bio fuels. The fuel comes from the by products of making sugar so it is extremely efficient. I think the neigh saying you might have heard about corn bio fuels is that it doesn’t come from a by product. The corn that is grown for bio fuels is used exclusively for fuel and nothing else which cuts into the food supply and thus is quite wasteful.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:41:00 +0000

I have a question on the stats here. The U.S. imports less than 3 billion pounds of coffee per year, so the 16 billion pounds of grounds doesn’t make much sense. Also, paper filters soak up some of the oils during the brewing process. Would that be captured?

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Is there any research on how the brewing process affects the beans’ usefulness as a fuel source?