England Sees Volkswagen Powered By Human Waste

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I guess you could call it a dung beetle. My stunningly bad pun work aside, the thrust of the story remains the same–the folks at Geneco, in an effort to prove it could be done, rebuilt a Volkswagen Beetle to run exclusively on methane, the kind of thing that makes the bathroom smell unpleasant after the Three Burrito Special at your favorite Mexican restaurant.

Now, before you start putting in an outhouse with the hopes of making your own methane-mobile, I’ll have to put a damper on your plan. See, it takes fully 70 homes’ worth of solid waste in a year to produce methane sufficient to run the Geneco special for 10,000 miles. That’s quite a lot, until you consider that there could be thousands of houses in range of one single solid waste treatment plant.

The Beetle in question, meanwhile, started out as a 2-liter convertible that runs now on a combination of regular fuel and compressed methane. In fact, it actually requires a little bit of gasoline to get its systems started, but after that, the so-called Bio-Bug can switch to methane. Earlier attempts made the cars lose performance due to impurities in the fuel (I’ll say!), but Geneco believes they’ve fixed these problems and now have the cars running at full capacity.

Following a trial period to make sure it works, Geneco’s next move is to convert all its company vehicles to compressed methane.