5 Extremely Strange Alternative Fuel Sources for Your Car

Who dreams up a car that runs on wood or coffee grounds or a way to turn road traffic into energy? Technology is always unpredictable and no one knows for sure what the future holds. Some of these ideas are brilliant and some are bizarre but at least these folks are thinking way outside of the box. The truck above, for example, runs on a strange combination of vegetable oil and ammonia.

Fueling your vehicle with coffee sounds like a strange alternative use for caffeine but it gets better: you don’t have to waste your favorite roast, you can simply use your remnant grounds. Through through process of gasification the reused grounds are carefully converted into a burnable fuel.

Using leftover alcoholic beverages as fuel is actually nothing new – they have been doing it with banned booze in some countries for years! All the same it is a ‘local’ way to take leftovers you aren’t using (like that bottle of vermouth you seem to never go through) and make something useful out of it.

Powering a car with wood may not be the most ecological power innovation in this list but it is at least an example of thinking of ways to run vehicles on anything but fossil fuels – a step in the right direction. All the same, emissions are of course still a major issue to be considered.

Using cars to create power is brilliant but also a bit puzzling: the process takes energy from one of the most wasteful energy consuming activities in the world and at least salvages a portion of that energy in a clean fashion. So far this is in prototype stages but in essence pressure is used by plates beneath roads to compress hydraulic fluid. The bigger the truck, the more power it uses but the more it generates as well! Best of all, you could turn around and funnel this energy into hybrid fueling stations – essentially getting a second round of energy out for the same vehicular use.