Bait and Switch

So ABC News just trumpeted a "high-school dropout" who's "doing what Detroit won't": making a Hummer get twice the mileage. How? By putting in a diesel engine and running it on canola oil.

"I don't mind seeing $10-a-gallon gas if I've got a 200 mpg car," he says.

Except.

He's not running on GAS. He's not making a Hummer that gets 30mpg on GAS. It's getting 30 mpg on canola. 30, I say. I don't know, maybe that's low. The story said "double" the mileage. Whatever, it's not going to be more that 40mpg, right? And what does a gallon of canola oil cost? Right now it'll cost you $10.24 to buy a gallon of canola at Giant.

So you're paying more than $2 a gallon more than you would if you were driving that Hummer in its normal, gasoline-using mode. That makes sense... sure.

He's talking a 200-mpg-car at $10/gallon ... but he's selling a 30-mpg-car at $10/gallon. Nice one.

And it costs upwards of $35,000 to do. Very nice.

Sure, if you do the engine replacement on a regular car, you can maybe jack that to an 80-mpg-car ... wait. Does it in fact double the mileage on anything? Or just things that get crap mileage now? If you've got a hybrid, will you in fact now get worse mileage with your canola-powered diesel engine? I think you might, since they very carefully only talked about low-mpg muscle cars and SUVs.

And last - he's pulling that old biofuels scam. If all the canola is being used to fuel cars, it's going to cost more than it does now. And if the cost of food is going up in the third world now because of biofuels, this won't help one little bit.