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British Coffee-Powered Car Beats Speed Record

British Coffee-Powered Car Beats Speed Record

And you thought you got amped up from one too many cups of coffee. This car went ahead and beat a Guinness World Record thanks to its coffee bean fuel.

Watch it run:

Blazing up to an average 66.5 miles per hour, this British Leyland Rover SD1 outfitted with a few engine tweaks to run on organic material, in this case coffee grounds, beat the previous world landspeed for a car run through a process called gasification. The previous world record was held by the American "Beaver Car," which ran on wood pellets and reached a top speed of 47 mph. BBC has more on the car's technology:

Engineer Martin Bacon from County Durham equipped the car with a gasifier which burns organic material at high temperature. This produces combustible gases which, after cleaning and cooling, are used to fuel an adapted combustion engine.

In this case, Gizmodo reports, the coffee grounds are combined with oxygen and heated to 1292 degrees Fahrenheit. Martin is reported as hoping to get the car to reach 80 mph.

Here's more about the car, which was designed in cooperation by the Teesdale Conservation Volunteers and BBC TV's Bang Goes the Theory show:

This wasn't the first coffee-powered car though. The Bang Goes the Theory designed a car in 2010 nicknamed the Car-puccino and converted from a 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco. Here's a visual of how the car worked:

Read more:

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