diesel Mini anyone?

"pip bip - choose Corrour" (hhgttg69)
06/21/2019 at 08:54 • Filed to: Daily Turismo, CL, Mini, BL, BLMC, Diesel

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DISCUSSION (7)

bhtooefr > pip bip - choose Corrour
06/21/2019 at 09:05

...I forget where I saw it, but somewhere I saw this car in person... TDIFest 2008, maybe? Quite far away from Oregon, wherever it was.

I remember rolling my eyes at the choice of fuel, too (there’s probably horrors of polymerized WVO living inside that engine), but still finding it pretty neat.

This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja: > pip bip - choose Corrour
06/21/2019 at 09:07

Would make an incredible tow rig. Who wouldn't love to see this thing pulling a 50' somethingorother?

pip bip - choose Corrour > This is what we'll show whenever you publish anything on Kinja:
06/21/2019 at 09:10

rais es h and

duurtlang > pip bip - choose Corrour
06/21/2019 at 09:11

A TUD5 (NA) diesel Peugeot engine from the early 90s? Sure, it was originally offered in the 90s Rover Metro and if someone knows how to build diesels it’ s Peugeot , but still. That’s a 57 hp engine and it sounds like a tractor (because 30 year old diesel tech).

They should swap in the TU5 JP4 S engine. Straight swap, still 1.5L, this time gasoline with 122 hp. That would transform that tiny Mini into a little rocket.

bhtooefr > duurtlang
06/21/2019 at 09:16

If I recall correctly, the entire point of the build was to have a Mini, but burn waste vegetable oil instead of gasoline in it.

To burn waste vegetable oil, you need a diesel of some sort.

I think WVO is incredibly silly and a good way to wreck engines, but over a decade ago, that was one of the big green DIY fads . (Either that or making your own FAME biodiesel from WVO, which was more work, but meant that you could just drive the car without worrying about fuel temperature and switching tanks, and done right it didn’t fuck up the fuel and oil systems.)

duurtlang > bhtooefr
06/21/2019 at 09:26

An old diesel isn’t exactly clean. And given the laughably low price of fuel in the US plus the (lack of) weight of the Mini and the low amount of kms this is driven a year, this seems rather silly.

But who am I to judge?

bhtooefr > duurtlang
06/21/2019 at 14:27

Well, this was over a decade ago, so you had some different factors going on.

This was the height of the 2003-2008 oil crisis, so fuel was 3-4 times what we were accustomed to paying - sure, globally, that was cheap, but it still blew huge holes in peoples’ budgets.

Making matters worse... decades of cheap gas meant that smaller, more efficient vehicles were exceedingly rare in the US market. Sure, the Prius and Insight had come out, but they were new, and priced at a premium.

A lot of the greenies at the time came from a more rural DIY hippie movement than the modern urbanist environmentalist trends, so most tailpipe emissions were fundamentally a non-issue due to low density - the focus was typically on Peak Oil, Middle Eastern oil and terrorist funding, and self-sufficiency , rather than on either CO2 or criteria pollutants. (And, a lot of people bought into anti-hybrid and later anti-EV FUD. Most of these types ended up buying Nissan LEAFs and home solar systems, though, in the end.)

If I recall correctly, this car was used as a show car meant to promote WVO systems? If that’s the case, the short distance it was driven was a non-issue. (Of course, the short distance that a lot of the cars that would’ve been converted would have survived without catastrophic injection system or engine failure would’ve been a bigger issue...)