The vehicle we used to drive from Dublin to Paris was a direct injection turbo diesel with an intercooler.
Its capacity is 2 litres and is a 4 cylinder engine.
The vechicle puts out 128bhp and 213 ft/lb of torque.
Diesel smoke tests while running on vegetable oil before our trip yielded an excellent average result of 0.73! Not bad for a 10 year old car!
We got 46miles per gallon while driving from Dublin to Paris mostly at motorway speed. Bear in mind this was with a suspension breaking heavy load!
This was on rapeseed oil given to us by our sponsors:
The journey used less than one tank of fuel! Again not bad for a ten year old car!
Mind you the car was not in perfect order before we set off on the trip. We serviced the car before we left doing everything ourselves except the oil change (we had no way of disposing of the used engine oil).
In fact the engine oil we used was given to us by Ecocar.ie the oil was made from plant oil!!
We also had to replace a headlight before we setoff! The original headlight would not align so I ordered a new one and fitted it. One slight problem.....the headlight was factory wired wrong!! Since we had no time to send it back and wait for a replacement I rewired it myself !!
This is a photo of the car just a few days before the trip to Paris(note we didnt have the logos on until the last minute )!! While we worked on the headlight we managed to leave a tool under the hood which jammed the bonnet shut!
We lost half a day of work trying to prize open the bonnet!! Not good when you need your modifications to be tested and time was running out!!
When the car comes back to Ireland we plan on doing some trips around Ireland and maybe even another cross European trip!