A 1983 Chevrolet squarebody pickup powered entirely by wood chips just clocked 77.6 mph in a standing-mile run on a closed airport runway. Its owner claims that’s a world record for a wood-fired vehicle, and nobody seems to be lining up to dispute it.
The truck belongs to the father of YouTuber Jp Prat Projects, and it hasn’t tasted a drop of gasoline in over 62,000 miles. That’s not a typo. The 350-cubic-inch V8 under the hood, a 1972 block no less, runs exclusively on wood gas generated by burning wood chips in a large metal cylinder bolted behind the cab.
The chemistry is straightforward, even if the engineering is anything but. Wood chips burn inside the cylinder, releasing carbon monoxide. That gas combines with hydrogen in a device called a gasifier, also mounted behind the cab.
A filter catches soot and ash before they can gum up the works, and a simple ball valve regulates flow into the engine. No modifications to the V8 itself. No secondary fuel needed to fire it up.
Getting to the airport for the record attempt required a 131-mile drive each way. Over the entire round trip, including the standing-mile blast, the truck consumed 80.5 pounds of wood per 60 miles. That’s roughly 15 percent more energy-intensive than burning gasoline, according to the video. But when your fuel literally grows on trees, the math starts looking different.
There’s a ritual involved. Before each drive, the filter needs cleaning and the ash pan needs emptying, not unlike tending a wood stove. A wadded piece of newspaper lit at the bottom of the gasifier gets the fire going. Budget five to ten minutes before you’re rolling.
Then there’s the storage problem. Wood chips are bulky. On normal drives, bags of fuel fill the truck’s bed entirely. For the speed record attempt, the team moved the wood supply to a trailer pulled by a support vehicle, shaving weight off the pickup for its runway sprint.
The carbon argument is interesting, though. Trees absorb carbon dioxide while they grow and release it when they die and decompose regardless. Burning them in a gasifier simply accelerates a process that was going to happen anyway, making the cycle close to carbon neutral.
Wood gasification isn’t new technology. It powered vehicles across Europe during World War II when petroleum was rationed. Seeing it bolted onto a Reagan-era Chevy with a Nixon-era engine and pushed to nearly 80 mph on an airstrip is something else entirely.
The standing-mile record claim is likely safe for a while. The competitive field for wood-powered land speed racing is, to put it generously, thin. But that almost makes the achievement more compelling. Jp Prat Projects isn’t chasing a trophy but proving a point about energy independence with a truck old enough to have a carburetor and fuel that falls out of the sky every autumn.
In a world consumed by battery-electric debates and hydrogen fuel cell arguments, a guy running a half-century-old V8 on wood chips for 62,000 miles without incident is the kind of stubborn ingenuity that built the car hobby in the first place.
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