SEMA Top Ten Trends: Green Machines

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

In the midst of an extravaganza that tends to emphasize eye-flattening horsepower and gratuitous fuel consumption, it was pretty funny to run across a whole corral of green vehicles under the cringe-worthy banner "Making Green Cool." While it’s a header that seems at first to protest too much, there were actually some pretty cool rides on display which fit the bill—sorta—for eco-friendliness. The two major themes were green racing performance—like this E98-fueled, NASCAR-engined ‘68 Camaro, finished in water-based primer, which will take a crack at the Bonneville land-speed record on E98 ethanol—and gigantic alt-diesel trucks, like the "Vegistroke" Superduty, which runs entirely on waste vegetable oil. Of course, the underlying message is that you can go "green" without sacrificing anything, which is a nice sentiment. Hell, it’s not like anyone’s ever tried to say that SEMA’s about being realistic! There was also a decent showing by the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE 100 mpg challenge cars, like this fox-body Mustang—more on those later. See more green machines after the jump.