Car that runs on coffee? Check. Coffee car that beats landspeed records? Not so check, until now. With this update to the original “Carpuccino”, the Teesdale Conservation Volunteers have built a car that can hit 107km/h running just on coffee beans, making it the fast gasification-powered car ever.
While the first coffee car was built out of a 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco, the Mark II is an even rarer British Leyland Rover SD1. Still retains that old-school DeLorean aesthetic, though. All the steel and valves the group outfitted the car with work together to turn coffee beans in biofuel. It’s a process called gasification, and it involves combining the coffee grounds with oxygen, and heating them up to 700C.
So all the coffee car had to do was beat the original record of 76km/h, held by an American wood pellet-powered “Beaver Car”. So the Teesdale crew teamed up with the BBC again to crush their record. Guinness responded in kind, granting them the new top spot. Pretty impressive. Check out their speed run at the BBC. [BBC via ExtremeTech]