Cool Cars That Run on Strange Stuff (PHOTOS)

Saltwater

Though gas prices aren't as high as they used to be, it’s still just as important for the planet to seek out alternative fuels that are accessible and cheap. And no matter how gas prices rise and fall, the margins of savings aren't that high in the long run. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, if your car has a 12-gallon tank, say, you’re likely to shell out close to $40 a pop.

Alternative fuels have made some serious strides in the 20-plus years since the original Energy Policy Act, which established regulations for some of these gas substitutes. Electric vehicles, for instance, made up just less than four percent of total vehicle sales in 2014, according to the Electronic Drive Transportation Association.

The options to make cars move, it seems, are far-reaching: from solar panels to, well, poop. We explore eight alternatives that could be in our driving future sooner than we think, like this car that runs on saltwater.

Though we can’t yet replace gas with the vast quantities of saltwater our oceans hold, one German car company has found a way to use the stuff to run its new e-Sportslimousine.

Quant unveiled the sports car (shown above) back in March at the Geneva Motor Show, and it recently got the green light for use on roads across Europe. Here’s the catch: With its nanoFLOWCELL technology, the car will essentially run on a battery powered by saltwater.

Here, Quant explains: “[It] works like a combination of a battery and a fuel cell using liquid electrolyte, which is kept in two tanks and pumped through the cell. At the heart of the system is a membrane that separates two differing chemistries. A controlled exchange of charges releases energy.”

It transfers energy in the same way a typical car battery does but can store 20 times more energy, according to Quant. And the company claims that the products needed to run the car — water, metal salts and crystal — have been produced in such an environmentally friendly way that if diluted enough, the fuel could be disposed of through normal wastewater treatment plants.

Car lovers might find another facet of this car more appealing: It can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than 3 seconds.

NEXT: Sunshine’s rays

The Sun

These days, solar power is not that unusual. But using it to move a car that comfortably seats multiple passengers still poses a challenge. This was the mission of Solar Team Eindhoven, a group of students at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands who created a solar-powered car that raced in the 2013 World Solar Challenge.

The four-seater reduces energy use through air-resistant design, according to the team’s website. Its roof is covered with high-yield solar panels, totaling about six square meters, that can generate about half of the car’s energy. According to Public Radio International, the car will be able to feed energy back into the grid as sun rays continue to hit the solar panels after the car is fully charged.

In October 2013, the team raced its car, named Stella, over more than 1,800 miles of Australian outback, from Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south for the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, a race to find the world’s most efficient car. That race included 42 teams from 24 different countries, all of which have built solar-powered cars with an eye toward maximum efficiency. The race happens every two years, with the next one taking place in 2015.

“I think that we’ve seen enormous increase in the use of electric vehicles, so a lot of technology has been advanced, in the last couple of years especially,” Roy Cobbenhagen, technical manager for Solar Team Eindhoven, told PRI. “With the technology of the batteries, now it’s good enough and the solar panels are good enough, that [a solar-powered family-sized car] is now possible.”

NEXT: Bacon as Fuel?

Cooking Grease

Want yet another awesome use for bacon? Why not use its grease to power your car. That’s the idea behind Wisconsin-based Bio-Blend Fuels. The company takes soybean oil, corn oil, used cooking oil, and yes, bacon grease, and transforms it into diesel fuel.

“When you burn biodiesel,” co-founder Dan Kaderabek told weather.com, “your clothes are going to smell like you were just cooking hamburgers. In five minutes it’s gone.” As opposed to normal diesel odors, which stick to your skin, your hair and your body through at least one wash, he added.

The U.S. Department of Energy succinctly describes this alternative energy source: “Biodiesel is a domestically produced, renewable fuel that can be manufactured from vegetable oils, animal fats or recycled restaurant grease. It is a cleaner-burning replacement for petroleum diesel fuel. It is nontoxic and biodegradable.”

The United States has just about 300 biodiesel stations. Even so, Kaderabek calls getting people to try this type of fuel an act of God. But, he adds, once they’re hooked, they’re hooked for life.

NEXT: Powered by Poop

Biogas

At sewage-treatment plants, bugs naturally break down waste and produce energy. But there’s a different kind of bug that uses that energy to help people get around: A VW Beetle, powered by biogas — aka, methane from your poop.

The car, dubbed the Bio-Bug, runs on the methane produced from the sewage treated at England-based Wessex Water. Methane is released when bugs break down biomaterials, a process known as anaerobic digestion.

To make a bio-based car run like a conventional car, the gas must undergo biogas upgrading, which involves separating carbon dioxide molecules, according to The New York Times. Greenfuel Company converted the Beetle, and Wessex-owned company GENeco provided equipment to treat the biogas, according to a Wessex Water press release.

The demonstration of this technology could be an important step toward creating sustainable fuels. In the release, Rupert Redesdale, president of the Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association, said that “biomethane cars could be just as important as electric cars” and called the Bio-Bug “very exciting and forward thinking.”

According to the release, the toilets of 70 homes in Bristol could power the car for 10,000 miles.

Air

Can a car drive if air is its only fuel? Yes, in fact. Within the past decade, the idea has cropped up and been put to the test around the world.

In 2008, Popular Mechanics reported that the Air Car, created by Tata Motors in India, would start being sold in the United States in 2009. (So far, it hasn’t happened.)

In early September 2013, Dearman Engine Company won a grant from the UK’s innovation agency, called the Technology Strategy Board, to “build and test a liquid air engine fitted in a commercial vehicle,” according to GasWorld. The company, working with several universities and research institutions, had already created what it calls a “novel, zero emission, piston engine” fueled on nothing but liquid nitrogen.

The idea is that a car running on liquid air acts almost like a steam engine. When the air flows into the engine and begins to boil, it turns into a gas, expands and starts the pistons moving, according to ABC News. And it has almost zero emissions. “It won’t produce any emissions because it’s only air we’re using,” Dearman told ABC News. “We’re not burning anything. We’re just using heat from the atmosphere and liquid air.”

Whether we might all drive cars filled with liquid nitrogen remains to be seen. The concept is still really new, only gaining popularity in May 2013 when The Center for Low Carbon Futures in the UK published a report about the alternative fuel.

NEXT: H20 as Fuel Alternative

Water

Cars fueled by water — actually the H2 component of the H20 — are a reality. Honda’s FCX Clarity, an electric vehicle powered by hydrogen, has been around since 2008 (and will be replaced by another fuel-cell car in 2015). At the Tokyo Motor Show in November 2013, Toyota revealed a water-fueled sedan that could be on the market within a few years, according to Bloomberg news.

They’re good for the environment, two to three times more efficient than a gasoline vehicle, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Plus, “hydrogen fuel cell vehicles emit only water vapor and some hydrogen, which are not concerns for air quality.”

However, there are some drawbacks to these cars having widespread appeal. One, like other electric vehicles, they need a charging station, and as the DOE notes, there are only 12 total in the country, 10 of which are in California. (The other ones sit in Columbia, South Carolina, and Wallingford, Connecticut.) Two, despite the claims of greater efficiency, it’s likely not enough of a change for drivers to see lower gas bills, Popular Mechanic’s senior automotive editor wrote in 2008, during the initial buzz about these vehicles.

Despite their lack of popularity right now, however, they could yet become trendy. The DOE touts hydrogen as one of the top alternative fuels.

NEXT: It’s Electric

Electricity

Electric cars have been around for a while; more than 20 years ago, the Energy Policy Act already considered electricity as a viable alternative source.

All-electric cars pull electricity from the grid, then store it in a battery. Hybrid and plug-in electric cars both run on a combo of electricity and conventional fuel. Despite which of these you drive, there’s likely money in the deal for you for a new purchase, in the form of a federal tax credit of up to $7,500.

They’re doing well sales-wise, too. Year over year, 2013 beat 2012 in terms of electric drive market share. For all of 2012, these vehicles made up 3.38 percent of total car sales, according to the Electronic Drive Transportation Association. For 2013, they made up 3.84 percent. Through August of this year, the total market share is slightly down, at 3.67 percent. But that’s more than 403,000 of the 11.1 million cars sold so far in 2014.) And the number of fueling stations is increasing, from 12,000-plus in 2013 to now more than 14,700 fueling stations across the country, in nearly every state.

In terms of greenness, these cars do pass the test, according to the Department of Energy, because they generate no tailpipe emissions. However, something else to keep in mind: “There are emissions associated with the production of most of the country’s electricity.”

NEXT: Runs on Tweets?

Social Media

Okay, this one's a little bit of a cheat.

On June 6, 2013, a restored 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia showed up in Washington, D.C., after a 1,000-mile trip from Kansas City, Missouri. Its fuel? Social media clicks.

The Kansas City–based nonprofit Minddrive, which works with students from the city’s core urban area, restored the car’s interior and exterior and converted it to run on a battery instead of its original engine. They then created a robotic device that connected to Wi-Fi and monitored the organization’s activity on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media outlets. If the online conversation slowed, the device prevented the car from being turned on.

Each social media interaction carried a given wattage — a tweet was worth one watt, a Facebook like three and so on. A device on the car’s dashboard tracked the social activity. The trip required an estimated 70,000 total watts; the team ended up with more than double.

“It was pretty risky to think we could go all the way to D.C. on social fuel,” Linda Buchner, president of Minddrive cause marketing and public relations, told weather.com. “But it turned out just great.”

As of last year at this time, the group was getting ready to convert four more Ghias and hoped to sell them for profit.