Veggie Volks!

Late summer in the valley and Bruce has a bumper crop of heirloom tomatoes. While we have been bumper to bumper all day...

We bought a great new used car today from a nice young woman in Sacramento. It’s a 2006 VW Golf TDI that has been professionally converted by Plant Drive (www.plantdrive.com) in Berkeley to run on veggie oil. It’s got manual push button controlled valves which automatically switch bio/diesel to veggie when the oil is hot enough and an automatic purge to switch back to the bio/diesel (so the oil doesn’t congeal in the lines.) It also can be run on straight bio/diesel by-passing the veggie system.

To run the car on veggie you put the veggie oil in the main tank and there’s a 2 gallon tank inside the spare tire, shown below, for starting/ stopping the car on bio/diesel.
Why these conversions cost $5000 is because the main tank requires a heater, as well as a heated filter and inline electric heater plus a flat plate heat exchanger (fphe) and 2 electric fuel pumps and electric switching solenoids.

This is essentially the same system from the same company that is on our Ford truck Veggie Voyager but this VW has heavy duty electrical fuel pumps and it has a newer, better heated oil filter.
It all intimidates me but I am glad, since I really needed to replace my Geo, which gets 40+ MPG, that I was able to get a car that gets 45-50MPG and can also run on veggie oil. I am very grateful, especially, that Michael has the expertise and the confidence to sort out the details and questions to make this alternative possible.