How does coffee-powered car work>?

EV Small Talk Tomorrow's EV
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Last week I noticed an announcement of an eco-engineered car powered by used coffee beans (!) setting a Guinness World Record with a speed of 65.5 mph.

Apparently the “car-puccino”:slight_smile: - actually a truck - works by heating coffee in a charcoal-fired burner, which produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen (ha, love chemistry!). Then the gases are cooled and filtered so that hydrogen can be used as actual fuel transferred to the engine. The whole process is called “gasification”.

I noticed there are a few handy people on Electric Forum attempting to make their own EV vehicles - kudos! But has anyone tried to build (or even heard off before!:wink: ) their own coffee or other domestic/industrial waste/byproduct car or bike?

2

I’ve seen this done on youtube, usually with wood gasses, to run small gas engines and generators. This was used during WW2 when petrol. was hard to come by. I heat my home with wood gasification tech… 6 years with no oil burned, 85-90% efficiency and very low emmissions.

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Sometimes I think our minds are too focused upon oil based fuels which over the years has reduced the number of people “thinking outside the box”. Who knows where we would have been at today if we had not taken up oil-based fuel and potentially looked elsewhere?