Can You Run Your Car On Cooking Oil?

Before diesel became modern slang for somebody big and tough, it mostly applied to vehicles that were big and tough. Mack trucks, tractor-trailers, bulldozers, some German cars. But it was never popular as fuel for conventional cars, which is really a shame, because diesel could have saved you lots of money.

Diesel is essentially a less refined version of gasoline, and costs the oil companies that make it something like twenty five percent less per gallon to manufacture, although the end product itself usually costs a bit more than gasoline.

But the advantage of diesel is that it gets both better fuel economy and produces less pollution than regular gasoline, which is why it’s so popular in the industrial fields. There’s no particular reason that diesel was never popular for regular vehicles, aside from the fact that diesel engines were initially designed for industrial vehicles, and have always had that association.

Diesel prices have risen just like gas prices have, so they haven’t become especially popular as a means to save on gas. This is compounded by the fact that most diesel vehicles that the ordinary person would use are either pick up trucks, not especially popular for city driving, or imported foreign cars that may be hard to find.

Where diesel vehicles have an advantage is that, unlike your typical automobile, they can burn a variety of fuels, all of which fall under the general definition of diesel. The one you hear about the most, and the one that’s become most common, is biodiesel.

As the name might have you thinking, biodiesel is made from organic sources. It’s become so popular commercially that it’s become necessary to make the distinction about what kind of diesel you’re talking about.

Unfortunately, biodiesel tends to not be any cheaper than the regular stuff, so while using it might make you feel better about using a sustainable resource, it won’t do much to help out your gas bill.

What you might not know is that there’s another kind of biodiesel out there. You can actually put used cooking oil in your diesel car and it will run without any kind of modification to the engine. This may be surprising, but as it happens, this is exactly what diesel engines were designed to do.

When Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine, the point was to create an engine that would run on vegetable oil, so that small farmers could compete with those who could afford the more expensive gasoline.

Now this is an opportunity to save cash. If you can pick up an old diesel vehicle or have a diesel vehicle, you can run it entirely on oils that your average restaurant is looking to get rid of. Most of the time, they’ll be happy to see you take it.

If you’re willing to put in the work and learn more about using vegetable oil to run your car, it’s entirely possible to run your car for free. Which, you have to admit, is a pretty big improvement over four dollars a gallon.