Watch This Old Fiat Run On Kerosene and Camp Fuel

When it comes to filling up your car with juice, it's important to get things right. A gasoline car will choke on diesel, and the opposite combination is ripe for trouble, too. But if you have a low-end car with a very basic engine, you can potentially run it on some very low-rent flammable fluids indeed.

The experiment comes to us from the YouTube channel Garbage Time. In their most recent video, the gang tries to run a Fiat 126 on "hardware store fuel." Sold in Australia as the FSM Niki, the two-door hatch originally came with a tiny 0.65-liter two-cylinder gasoline engine good for 24 horsepower. The experiment aimed to see if the humble Italian people's car would run on denatured ethanol, kerosene, or camp fuel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbnlxTbMZ1k

To give the unconventional fuels a fair shot, the engine was first started and warmed up on standard gas. The Fiat was then rigged up to sip from a lawnmower fuel tank filled with kerosene. With a miserable octane rating of approximately 30, kerosene is a terrible fuel likely to cause detonation in virtually any gas engine. It's also not very volatile, which can make proper ignition harder.

Amazingly, the simple carbureted engine was able to keep running on kerosene, albeit with significant pinging. Due to the low octane rating, however, it did cause the engine to run on after the ignition was switched off. That's largely because the kerosene was igniting due to compression in the cylinder, rather than by the action of the spark plug. Only a full 14 seconds after switch-off did the engine sputter to a stop. The warm engine was even able to restart on kerosene alone.