Car Moon

When people think of alternative fuels for their cars, we doubt that coffee beans make the list. Yet a team of wacky inventors from the BBC1 science programme "Bang Goes The Theory" have managed to create a vehicle runs solely on gas produced by espresso roasted coffee granules!

Nicknamed Car-puccino, this 1988 VW Scirocco that looks like a bit like the Marty Mcfly's time-travelling DeLorean DMC-12 from the 'Back to the Future' trilogy, has been heavily modified to us coffee granules to power the engine.

So how does it work? According to the graph, the first stage involves heating the coffee granules with charcoal until the beans break down into cool hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

The gas is then fed into a radiator to chill down before it is filtered out in the boot. The purified gas is then led through a rooftop pipe into the engine where it burns and powers the car.