Dark Roasted Road Trip: Cappuccino Loving Classic Car

A lot of us already function on pure coffee, but now there’s a car that shares our caffeine obsession. The CarPuchino was built by a crew for the BBC program Bang Goes the Theory – and it runs on nothing but coffee grounds. Imagine: no more falling asleep at the wheel!

The car is a 1988 VW Scirocco and the fuel is plain old ground coffee beans. The process is simple enough: the coffee is brewed in the gas cylinder and broken down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, then cooled, filtered and fed into the engine where it burns to fuel the car.

Unfortunately, the car doesn’t go very fast or very far – though the very fact that it’s running on coffee should buy the car some forgiveness. The top speed is 60MPH and you have to stop every 40 miles to top up the coffee grounds, and every 60 miles to clean out the filters. And let’s hope you’re more concerned about your emissions than your bank account, because running this contraption will cost you a wallet-busting $10/mile…give or take, depending on the type of coffee you use.

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See more in Mods & Custom or under Transportation. July, 2010.