Responsible Driving Discussion

Hello all, I want to get the discussion going with a real-world problem I'm trying to work out for myself. I hope it may encourage all of us to think critically on these problems. It may even cause you to think critical of me ;-)

Right now, I have two vehicles, a 1983 Mercedes 240 Diesel running, as a yearly average, about 60% biofuel. In the summer time, I run 100% biodiesel, and in the Wisconsin wintertime I vary from about 2% to about 50% depending on the temperature and whether I can pump bio at all from my outdoor drum. The MB gets about 32 mpg.

I also have a 1980 Ford E150 Econoline van, done up in a classic hippie style, with a patchwork floor, carpeted walls, and a furry ceiling. Really, you have to see it to appreciate it - and knowing me helps ;-) It's a great roadtripping mobile, and with the small 6 cylinder engine and the manual transmission it does about the best anyone can expect from such a large vehicle - about 19 mpg tops. Runs on gasoline, of course. I have reasons for such a vehicle. It's ideal for my son, a 7 year old autistic child. It's roomy for moving things, which I often do. It works well for community activities, such as going to a music festival or farmer's market, which we also do.

I'll also point out that I consider both of my vehicles “community vehicles”. Sure, I paid for them and maintain them, but we have an extended community of friends and family that use either vehicle as needed. Some of them manage to remain car-less in large part because they can use mine. Two of them managed to drive a more efficient biofueled vehicle because the van was available when they needed something bigger.

Here is my dilemma. I love driving the van but feel guilty whenever I do - it only uses fossil fuels, and does so with poor efficiency. I want to keep it - or a vehicle like it - and look for a way to balance out that decision.

My current thinking is to sell the Mercedes to someone wishing to do biodiesel. (It's probably not too hard for me to do that - there's a lot of interest in this area, and I'm somewhat known for my advocacy.) With those proceeds buy either an older VW diesel (1980's or 1990's, pre-TDI for cost reasons) or a 1989 or 1990 Geo Metro. Either of those vehicles are capable of >50 mpg, and I'm comfortable enough driving either. In doing this, I'm increasing my “average” efficiency by at least 40% (at least 35 mpg avg vs 25 mpg avg). Then I watch the local auctions for a diesel van (not the easiest thing to come by) and purchase one when available. Convert that to run on WVO (this is doable for me, both cost-wise and labor-wise), and do the interior conversion to suit my personality ;-) Then sell the gas van.

Net costs to me are probably about $1500 - $2500 dollars above the equity I have in my two vehicles, and about 100 hours labor. Both of these numbers are toward the high end of what I can afford.

What are your thoughts? Given the constraints (money, time, size of the vehicles, etc.) do you have other solutions? Any other recommendations on how I might reduce the footprint even further? Ox, do you work cheaply enough to convert an old Ford van to a biodiesel-electric hybrid? ;-)

Thanks for your consideration of this question. I hope it sparks some interesting conversation. Please feel free to be critical of me and my choices as you see fit as well!

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

It sounds like you're trying to make the best decision regarding the balance between your footprint and your family needs.  I don't think you have anything to feel guilty about.  If you can afford the $2500, I'd say go for it.  Get the VW diesel or Geo Metro, and keep an eye out for a diesel van.

And I hope Ox chimes in.  I would really like to know if it would be possible for us to build some bio-diesel plug-in hybrids.  Ox, can it be done?

~M

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

Howdy -

Firstly, and perhaps the most important thing I'm going to say, is that you have no reason to feel guilty. You are clearing on the leading edge of the movement to convert away from petrofuels.

That being said, I have nothing but admiration for the fact that you value the environment even more than your sentiment for what sounds like a vehicle that holds a lot of character.

Is your goal to wind up with something that looks like another “hippie” van, or is it simply to wind up with a biofuel vehicle with a generous cargo capacity? In other words, is it neccesary to hold out for a diesel van at all…or could we take the frame and powertrain from say, a larger suburu diesel stationwagon getting around 40mph, and then build a body onto it with satisfactory cosmetic appeal?

Regardless, we must begin with the end goal in mind…

As to Matt's suggestion of a biofuel/plug-in hybrid. Can it be done with today's technology? Yep. Absolutely.

Great care must be taken to isolate the electrical components, only because diesel has a much lower ignition temperature than gasoline…so we can not allow any arcing, or even overheating components, to accidentally turn the vehicle into a fireball. I would personally encase the fuel tank in phenolic, pot all stress points on wiring harnesses in epoxy, make a deliberate escape path for leaks, etc.  One must also research the home made vehicle code for the state in which one resides…most states have one because of aftermarket modifications made by NASCAR people…to make sure when you are all done, you'll still be allowed to drive it legally on the streets!

I do not see biofuel/plug-in hybrids reaching the commercial marketplace in time for them not to be obsoleted by other technologies. There's marketing problems in biofuels, in that the majority market population don't want the famous “fried chicken/french fry” odor. However, I do see potential for fleet vehicles. Smaller fleet vehicles that run predictable routes, like USPS delivery vans, are already electric. Larger fleet vehicles, like NAFTA Class 8 heavy trucks, are increasingly running on bio/petro blends…and as such are compelling the installation of biofuel blend pumps along America's highways. This fuel is typically between 5 and 15 percent biodiesel brewed from virgin soybean oil.

Can convergence be far beind? Time will tell.

Best,
Ox

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

What a thoughtful response. Thank you.

Would you clarify your points on the ignition temperature? My understanding is the gasoline has a much lower ignition temperature, and can tell you from my own experiments that diesel fuel must be heated to almost 150* F to ignite reliably, biodiesel to 200*, and vegetable oil to almost 400*. These are not scientific results, but in searching online I find a physics text claiming the piloted ignition of gasoline is -43* C, while the piloted ignition of petroleum diesel is 62* C. These will vary of course according to formulation, but gasoline should always be more volatile.

In short, I believe working with diesel is safer than working with gasoline, and working with biodiesel is safer that working with diesel. Then there's vegetable oil - I can tell you from extensive experience it's difficult to get that to burn! Helps to have a torch…

As to the design of the vehicle, I am not tied to anything. Taking an old VW camper body and putting it on my Mercedes frame could be ideal. Of course, there is the problem of differing engine locations between the two platforms… but for a (bio-)diesel-electric hybrid, really, one may not need to change the body at all.

For example, take a VW bus: Remove the engine and transmission. Build a battery bank in front of the engine cavity, inside the vehicle. Graft a 15kW/20 HP electric motor (probably AC servo) onto each (modified) drive shaft. Install an electric-start Chinese 12 HP Changfa diesel with a 10 kW generator into the engine cavity, along with an inverter/power converter with large heat exchanger. Run the motors in series for torque, in parallel for speed. The genset's not quite big enough to handle stop-and-go traffic where the HP requirements are much higher, but will probably cruise at 55 with just a little excess power.

The downsides? Probably cost upwards of $5,000 in parts, add more than a half a ton to the weight of the vehicle (270 pound generator, 250 pound engine, 90 pounds for each motor, and at least 800 pounds in batteries), and have a working range of about 30 miles in the city or 75 on the highway if you've got a headwind or are in a hurry. None of this is to say it can't be done - it has, generally with a smaller vehicle pulling a genset in a trailer (called a “pusher” actually).

Alas, I may be cynical. My Mercedes has a 67 HP/50 kW engine that weighs about the same as the Changfa. Maybe the idea should be to use the drive motors as generators, like the Honda and Toyota hybrids do. This gets so complicated for me…

Running straight biodiesel sure is easier!

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

Howdy -

The autoignition temperature of commercial gasoline varies between 246C and 257C, depending on octane rating. The higher the octance rating, the greater the resistance to autoignition. This resistance is desirable in the case of gasoline, because gasoline engines are spark-ignited. If they were to autoignite before the they were supposed to, this would result in engine knock.

We must remember that a diesel engine is not spark ignited. The fuel is expected to autoignite simply in the presence of hot air. Therefore, autoignition resistance is NOT desirable. Diesel's autoignition temperature is around 210C (for a commerical diesel with a Cetane Number between 45 and 50).  In fact, the reason diesel gets a different rating scale is because is it opposite in autoignition character to gasoline…

Now, I can't speak to the autoignition temperature of home-brewed bio-diesel…but if we are pouring that into an unaltered commercial diesel engine, that engine will perform best if it has a resulting CN around 45-50.

Now let's ask ourselves the question…what happens if an accidental electrical arc from the electric half of a biodiesel/electric hybrid comes anywhere near a vat of fuel designed to ignite, all by itself, without even the assistance of a spark?

FLASH! BANG! BOOM!

Make sense?

For more on the chemistry and rating systems, check out the following search terms on wikipedia…they do a far better job explaining it then I probably have:

autoignition temperature
centane
octane
flash point

Hope that helps,
Ox

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

'kay, I went to a “green” home show today and I'm not in full onslaught rant mode. I got in an argument with a guy at the biofuels booth.

He was busy telling a woman that using 85% ethanol would cut vehicle emissions by 150 to 200 percent and I felt it necessary to butt in and point out that this is not physically possible and he went off on me and told me that it didn't actually matter if ethanol had double the greenhouse emissions of petroleum, that it would still be more valuable to make the stand for renewable fuel.

Well, I came home and started researching more and I gotta say that I'm seeing very little benefit to any of the biofuels. It starting to look like substituting methadone for heroin…you're still addicted and it can still kill you.

I'm reserving most of my rant for my website and I want to look into the number more thoroughly first, but I'm leaning towards saying you should keep your van, quit feeling guilty and think about getting a bike instead of the mercedes. ;-)

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

He was busy telling a woman that using 85% ethanol would cut vehicle
emissions by 150 to 200 percent and I felt it necessary to butt in and
point out that this is not physically possible and he went off on me
and told me that it didn't actually matter if ethanol had double the
greenhouse emissions of petroleum, that it would still be more valuable
to make the stand for renewable fuel.

I've concluded that this whole green / alternative energy thing tends to attract people whose hearts are in the right place but just aren't very sm… who have not fully developed their critical thinking skills.  I try not to let it bother me.

BTW, I don't normally think of myself as dyslexic, but on your blog I kept seeing “bio-recluse” instead of “bricoleuse”. 

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

Excellent points - I want to move this discussion into its own post, because it's a really important question. I hope you'll continue your points there.

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

Absolutely. I'm in full-on rant mode about alternative fuels at the moment. ;-)

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

Excellent! See the post titled “Why use biofuels?”, also in the “Introductions and General Discussion” section.

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

I am in the enviable position of living very close to where I work.
I detest the freeway and traffic and avoid it almost obsessively.
I will always try and keep my setup this way as it not only keeps my motor swithched off but keeps me out of the traffic.
A suggestion could be… if at all possible - work from home!

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

So, I'm curious…did you ever resolve this dilemma, or did you decide to just keep on driving the van you already have?

Re: Responsible Driving Discussion

I'm so glad you asked, Barbara! As it happens, I am still driving the van I already had - even to work today, against a friend's advice who was concerned about me falling asleep at the wheel because I spent all night talking with her.

But that's not the whole story. A week ago Sunday after much deliberation I bought a 1992 Ford E-350 diesel van. The van itself is pretty interesting. It lived its first life as a fire chief's command control vehicle, so it's fire-engine red with a glow-in-the-dark white stripe down each side. It has a built-in countertop/desk unit with shelves and cabinets, lots of interior lighting, and two flip-up sunroofs. With only 116k miles on the clock, it runs like a top and has been well maintained. The previous owner bought it at auction and was a Ford diesel mechanic himself. He drove it for 4k miles and fixed most everything it needed. It can tow a household-full of furnishings from the Pacific Northwest to middle America.

The story is compelling even beyond this van, though. I hit another dilemma - deciding between two vehicles the seller had for sale, this one and a 1991 diesel ambulance. It, too, made for an excellent choice - spacious, ideally suited not only to a vegoil conversion but on-board WVO filtering and easy configuration as a vegoil demonstration vehicle, a feature almost as important to me as running on a byproduct non-petroleum fuel. Unfortunately, it needed a little more work than the van and represented, to me, too much inertia - both in terms of its weight and fuel requirements and in terms of its size and navigability on the road and in my life. I wanted it; I tried to make it work in my head; but I chose the van.

To complicate the decision even more, a close friend who is also an auction-jockey (as he claims) or auction-junky (as I claim) found a smaller, lighter box ambulance at auction last weekend, in “twice as good a shape” by his claim, and bought it for significantly less than half the price of the ambulance I looked at. And although he encouraged me toward the van (and drove down with me to pick it up), he liked the idea of the ambulance so much that he bought this one in hopes I might like it. He even offers to carry the financing for me, since I've just blown a good portion of my wad on a firetruck ;-) (I'm not really that much like a four-year-old… the firetruck reference plays much better with my son than with me!)

So I may still end up with an ambulance to convert as a vegoil demonstration vehicle. My difficulty is in justifying it, and the tack I'm taking is three-fold:

First is the aforementioned demonstrations, which not only will satisfy me deeply, but may get me into some pretty cool venues for free - like, for example, the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair (”the world’s largest renewable energy educational event of its kind” - a Wisconsin event even bigger than anything the crunchies on the west coast have to offer ;-) and the various peace-justice-community-and-sustainability music festivals I like to attend. Since these events also represent the four or five times a year I would use such a vehicle most effectively, this justification is two-fold.

Second is the possibility of offering it as a community-operated vehicle, sharing it cooperatively with others who respect what such a vehicle offers, both practically and symbolically.

Third is the consideration that I may take my professional skills back “on the road”, migrating to contract engineering and programming jobs, in order to pursue the work I find most fulfilling while also having the ability to spend time with the people I love, where they are, and also transport the people I love to where they need to be.

Equally important in this discussion, however, is the process I went through before making these decisions. It was a stringent analysis from both rational and emotional directions, but the rational procedure may be interesting. Among other things, I built a spreadsheet that evaluated the relative costs - both financial and environmental - of operating each car I currently own or considered buying, and then put pairs of cars together (my practice of driving older, less reliable vehicles requires me be redundant) and considering each of those costs as parts of a system of transportation.

Unfortunately, I don't know exactly how to put that spreadsheet into this post. Actually, I think I do know, but even then it may not be an easily-decipherable communication tool, so I'm not posting it from here but offer it on request to anyone interested.

I have to mention also that many, many friends participated in this decision, and I can't overstate my appreciation. That includes the members of this forum who listened patiently through my original post, offered succinct advice, and have suffered through this update. Yet, the process isn't complete yet - I still need to decide on the second ambulance (I see it this weekend) and replace the Mercedes soon with a 50+ mpg commuter car.

Stay tuned!