The Mercedes Wrangler is riding the eco-range
[By Larry Gallagher, Special to SF Gate]
You will know him by his smell, that cloying, almost-familiar odor of french fries gone wrong, a smell that can pique and puncture your appetite in the same instant. He'll be wearing the same outfit -- black leather jacket, T-shirt, blue jeans -- but he'll be driving a different car every time you see him, a different turbocharged Mercedes Benz diesel from the early Reagan years.
His saddlebag is light, just the essentials of modern life: a toothbrush, a change of clothes, a cell phone and a laptop loaded with 6,000 MP3s to keep him company through those long, lonely hours on the trail. His range covers the 900 miles of I-5 from the Southern California desert to the rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. He corrals the old diesels in the wilds of greater Los Angeles, before they are put out to pasture, and, riding the jet stream of supply and demand, leads them to their new lives as veggiemobiles for eco-hipsters in Seattle.
Meet Brian Friedman, the very model of the modern Mercedes Wrangler.
To understand the social and mechanical forces that have created a niche market for a Mercedes Wrangler, you must first be subjected to two facts and three theories. Fact #1: Around the turn of the last century, German inventor Rudolf Diesel designed an internal combustion engine to run on peanut oil. Fact #2: Built to withstand higher compression and with fewer moving parts, the modern descendants of that engine tend to run longer than their gasoline- owered peers. Theory #1: The best cheap passenger diesels available in this country are Mercedes from the early '80s. Theory #2: There were a lot more rich people in LA 25 years ago than there were in Seattle. Theory #3: There are a lot more eco-hipsters in Seattle today than there are in LA.
I met Friedman a few weeks ago on a street corner in San Francisco, where he was showing one of his recent acquisitions to a friend of mine. He was then in transit north, but the next time he passed through town, I cornered him long enough to get his story. "This was not the plan," he began. Like many a frontiersman before him, he had once believed in the system, had tried to make a go of it on the inside. He was a legitimate business owner, opening up what he claims was the first salon in the country to offer tattooing and piercing under the same roof, in San Jose.
Five years later, he moved to San Francisco and opened up a salon called Anubis Warpus, on Haight Street. For 15 years, he claims, he tried to play by the rules, only to have some bureaucrats at the state Employment Development Department decide to make an example of him. He's cagey about the details, wants to bury that part of his past. "Let's just say I believe the whole system is corrupt," he says.
Three years ago, he walked away from his business. At the age of 36, he had decided to kick it all in the head and get off the grid, literally and metaphorically. "It's not like I wanted to be a hermit or anything," Friedman says. "I was just trying to figure out a way to hang out with my friends, live in an Airsteam, that sort of thing. It had just gotten to the point where it became impossible to be part of a system I no longer believed in."
As part of his new future, Friedman began researching technologies that would allow him to live outside of the mainstream without losing too many of the comforts of modern life. It was only a matter of time before he stumbled on the world of biofuels, types of fuel derived from biological raw materials. With his new streamlined economic profile, the idea of tapping into free sources of vegetable oil for vehicle fuel had an instant appeal; it allowed him to indulge his love for driving without supporting the increasingly problematic petroleum industry.
To run a modern diesel engine on veggie oil, he learned, you either modify the oil or modify the engine. To do the former, you cook it up with lye and methanol to settle out the glycerine. The stuff at the top of the stew pot is what is known as biodiesel, and you can pour it into the tank of any diesel and drive off.
Straight veggie oil, or SVO, as it is known in the biz, needs to be heated before it will run with any kind of predictability, so all conversions involve some device to heat the oil before it hits the injectors. But once you've licked that problem, you can back up to the oil Dumpster at any restaurant and fill up your tank with free fuel. (OK, it's more complicated than that. You've got to pour the stuff
through filters to reduce the amount of french fry debris, water and drowned rodents that get sucked through your fuel system. And you've got to get the permission of the restaurant owner and avoid the renderer. But you won't have to lay out any hard currency for a tankful.)
Friedman's first vehicle was a Datsun truck. "I wouldn't recommend it," he says, and leaves it at that. He had heard that Mercedes diesels were more robust but was intimidated by the price of replacement parts. Eventually, he located the right salvage yard in LA and made the upgrade.
Before Friedman had finished converting his first Mercedes, he had friends lining up to buy it off him. He started looking through the auto listings on the West Coast and found an abundance of them in Southern California -- people seemed happy to unload them. "I didn't even have to talk them down," he says. And even though it is not uncommon for a diesel engine to log half a million miles, once they get in the vicinity of 200K, dealers won't touch them. Nor was there much of a demand from righteous hippies. "In LA, they think it's a joke. They look at me as if I should be embarrassed to be running on veggie oil."
Friedman found a lot more enthusiasm among his slacker friends in San Francisco, but few had enough money to shell out even a few thousand dollars for a 25-year-old car. So he went online and searched through the Web sites of biodiesel collectives up and down the West coast and found Seattle to be the epicenter of the clamoring, where there were enough people with enough money to justify the time and effort. The last piece of the chain had fallen into place.
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The Mercedes Wrangler is riding the eco-range
