Two weekends ago, we welcomed a new addition to our household: A 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300D Turbo Diesel. She has 154,500 original miles and a single tank vegetable oil conversion installed by Lovecraft Bio-Fuels. She can run on diesel, bio-diesel, WVO, or vegetable oil. We were celebrating Tracy’s birthday weekend and we drove over to Michael’s in Santa Monica for a wonderful dinner. On Sunday, I filled up with my first tank of bio-diesel. We were promptly pulled over by the police. I knew the tags were expired, so I showed them a copy of the title signed the day before and my license and insurance documents. They promptly waved us away. When the Acura was stolen, my first thought was to try to use the experience to make a positive change that leaned more towards my environmental sensibilities. When she was located without her engine and transmission, I considered the concept of buying her from the insurance company and converting her to an entirely electric system,.. but the logistics and economics prevented that. We looked into hybrid alternatives, but again economics was an issue and I didn’t have a desire to go further into debt and incur a car note. I’ve lived too long without a car payment to get involved with that again. I was feeling like there was not going to be an economical way to accommodate my desire for change when I recalled hearing about diesel cars being converted to run on vegetable oil. It sounded crazy. It still sounds crazy. I began doing research on the topic and after a lot of digging, I found out that a prime candidate for this type of conversion is Mercedes-Benz diesels. Particularly, models between 1976 and 1985. These cars were built with the legendary W123 chassis. 20 years after the production of these vehicles there were as many as 75% of the originally registered cars on the road and they routinely reach over 500,000 miles in a lifetime. This concept blew my mind. Being one that has always enjoyed testing the bounds of my understanding, I started looking for a car. I actually found quite a few in the Los Angeles area,.. both those that had been converted and those that hadn’t. I had my mechanic look at a couple of them, but there were issues that would have added costs on top of the buying price and I quickly became discouraged. It wasn’t going to be easy to find the car I was looking for with the specifications and quality I desired in the price range I had set, so I started looking at more “practical” choices,.. but I kept finding myself looking at these 300D & 300CD Mercedes. One evening while poking around the internet, I found an ad for a car that was located just down the street in Venice. After several back-and-forth e-mails, I set up a date to look at the car on Friday night. By Saturday afternoon, I had it checked out by a reputable mechanic and was driving home in my new-old Mercedes. I got my title in the mail today. Last night Kentaro told me that about 5 years ago he had seen a show on Japanese television about a monk that was going from house to house collecting their used cooking oil. He was then putting it in his car and would drive around. He said he didn’t understand it at the time, but that now he does because it’s what I’m doing. The car came with a bonus: a cassette tape of Cat Steven’s Tea for the Tillerman.