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"Electric cars are eco-friendly, green..." and so on. That may well be true, but who needs a super-fast Tesla charger when you can simply fill your motorcycle with leftover restaurant oil and happily hit the road?
Well, not quite the used oil itself, but pretty close. It's biodiesel, to be precise. And not on just any motorcycle, but on this modified 1999 Harley Davidson Heritage Softail. Why this particular bike? Simply to prove the concept works.
A team led by Alex Genesis, a 22-year-old engineering student at the University of British Columbia, has come up with a clever solution for cutting carbon emissions from the university's heavy machinery, such as gardening equipment, trucks and other vehicles.
And what better way to prove the concept than by fitting a tractor engine into an old Harley and running it on used vegetable oil?
Remarkably, Genesis is now riding this motorcycle on a 1,200-mile (1,931 km) journey along the west coast of the United States. But why a Harley? And why this particular model?
"I chose the 1999 Harley Davidson because it was the last model where the engine and gearbox were separate, before they were combined into a single unit," he says.
After stripping the bike down, the first step was fitting a three-cylinder Kubota engine, normally diesel-powered. Kubota donated the engine to the project to help demonstrate that clean fuel is viable.
"Everyone customises Harleys to make them their own, and the idea here was to blend the old with the new, and do something bold with an iconic bike that everyone recognises."
Genesis has not revealed the exact engine specifications on his YouTube channel, but it is believed to be a 1,647cc D1703 producing roughly 35 horsepower.
Genesis wrote in a LinkedIn post:
"After 12 months of late nights, fabrication, welding and calling in favours for technical advice, I built a biodiesel-powered Harley from scratch. Not for profit, not for show, but to prove a point: clean fuel is possible today."
He added:
"Most university and municipal fleets still run on diesel, and heavy-duty electric vehicles still depend on materials like cobalt mined in the Congo through child, women's and men's labour, where seven people die every week from mine collapses. Copper, too, is extracted through the burning of the Amazon rainforest."
Genesis explains that campus restaurants pay to dispose of used frying oil. "You can take vegetable oil that would normally be thrown away, chemically process it into fuel, and use it to run university equipment, so that UBC's fleet essentially runs on its own kitchen waste."
Alongside redesigning the engine to run on used cooking oil, the student team worked with operators of the university's 400-vehicle fleet to develop biodiesel technology suited to cold climates, which Genesis says cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 74%.
That figure is the driving force behind the project: proving that a cleaner, more sustainable fuel exists than current options, particularly as electric vehicles remain dependent on rare-earth minerals surrounded by ethical concerns such as forced labour and environmental exploitation.
Genesis describes the motorcycle as a "rolling proof of concept," and his team hopes to raise enough funding through GoFundMe to continue the journey on the road, and to show that the idea is not just an experiment but a practical, workable option.
Source: New Atlas