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Originally Posted by genius
no, i dont know about maine. i have only watched reports on german TV about some germans, who fuel their old VWs with vegetable oil. i think refitting other towns people's cars would be problematic here, because of all the beaurocracy, changes to the vehicle must be certified by an agency we call TUV (technischer ueberwachungsverein), if you have an accident with a car with a modified engine, your insurance may refuse to pay etc.
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Doing a Google search yielded some 235,000 hits on "vegetable oil car", so I guess this guy in Maine isn't as unique as I thought.
What a great idea, though. As an ex-restauranteur, I can tell you that dealing with used oil is a big hassle. It sits in this huge tank outside your joint, stinking up the place and then you pay a guy to come by a couple times a month to pick it up. Even a moderately sized restaurant will use a couple hundred gallons of oil every month. Fast food joints probably use at least a thousand gallons. I don't even want to think about what happens to this nasty stuff after that.
Even if that is not enough for billions of gallons we would go through, I bet we could get third world countries growing enough corn to supply the rest. Ethiopia could be the next Middle East.
Somebody needs to get on this and build a car that can start and stop on vegetable oil.