Rather than car park full of shiny supercars and classic metal, this combination of a car and coffee involves powering the former with the latter to break a land speed record.
It's not as simple as giving your car a morning caffeine boost though. Engineer Martin Bacon from Teesdale in the UK and a group of Teesdale Conservation Volunteers took one 1980s Rover 3500 SD1 (a car actually sold in the U.S. in V8 form for a brief period) and equipped it with an onboard wood gas generator.
Also known as a gasification system, the generator burns wood and coffee grounds at a very high temperature - more than 1292 Farenheit - which releases a gas that can be used to power an internal combustion engine, in this case a 2.6-liter inline-six powering the rear wheels. The gas is a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and methane. Some of the gas is compressed to 150 PSI and injected directly into the manifold to boost power.
Once you've done all that then naturally, you want to see how fast it can do. 77.5 miles per hour is the answer with average speeds of 66.5 mph.
As the generator in the back was so heavy the team needed to remove 550 pounds of excess weight from the Rover, but the speed they reached smashed the previous "vehicles running on gas from organic waste" Guinness World Record of 47.7 mph, set in 2010.
You can check out a video of the team's project below.
At 77 mph it probably doesn't make you feel any more perky, and according to a comment on the youtube video, it doesn't give off a nice early morning coffee smell either. According to Martin, "it smells like your house has been on fire". Nice.
We have to say, given that the record was attempted in Great Britain, we're hoping their next record attempt is powered by tea.
Want to know more? Head over to the Coffee Car website.
