Biodiesel car rental comes to L.A.

Hawaii-based company rents cars fueled by filtered vegetable oil, which lasts up to 800 miles per tank.

The story "Biodiesel car rental comes to L.A." published March 1, 2006 at 7:22 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[fear_and_loathing]

Performance

Anyone know how fast these cars go?
How powerful are they (do they bog down going up hill)?
Are these cars good for getting "around town" only?
800 miles to the tank sounds great unless you can't get above
40 M.P.H.

[ewk]

Shouldn't be a problem

My understanding is bio disiel in a standard disiel car runs just as if the car was on normal disiel.

Given the name of the compnay I would guess they are using VW Bugs.

Slightly modified Diesel autos

There are a few parts in a standard diesel auto that need to be replaced in order to use bio-diesel. Usually, certain rubber hoses that don't react well to the bio-diesel. Other than that, from everything I've read/seen to date, the bio-diesel autos perform just like their petro-diesel counterparts. They get better gas mileage and have lower emissions.

There was a show on the Discovery Channel, "Dirty Jobs", a few weeks ago that featured a story on producing and using bio-diesel.

Basically the interviewee went around to the local restaurants and collected the waste vegetable oil from the deep fat friers etc. It didn't matter how "used" the oil was or what the mix was, i.e., corn, peanut, soy, olive, what ever. No money changed hands. The restaurant was happy to get rid of the waste oil(and most certainly would have had to pay a disposal service to collect it) and the interviewee was happy to take it away. In fact, the vehicle he used to haul the waste oil was powered by the bio-diesel he produced. Win-Win, What a concept.

The interviewee took all the oil he had collected for that day(about 50 gallons(US))and mixed it all together in a processing plant that he had in his barn. He basically did some filtering, some light weight chemistry and some waiting. He produced about 40 gallons(US) of bio-diesel with about 10 gallons of "waste" product in the form of glycerine. I place waste in quotes because it is only a waste product in terms of the bio-diesel process. There are many viable uses for the glycerine with additional filtration.

The interviewee used the bio-diesel to power his autos as well as a diesel electric generator used to provide electricity to his house and heat water.

According to the interviewee it took all of 2.5-3.0 hours to produce the 40 gallons of bio-diesel and that his cost/gallon was about $1.50(US)

It would not surprise me to find out that Scott Stenshol, the subject of this article, was also producing the bio-diesel fuel to power his rental cars, and making a tidy profit.

The American Dream realized...