Well, my WVO experiment turned out to be something of a life saver. I'm currently on a fool's errand of trying to calibrate each tickmark on the Rabbit's fuel gauge to a particular number of gallons of fuel burned (the method is fairly messy, but I tally the number of miles on the trip odo for each tickmark and then after fill-up extrapolate the number of gallons a particular tickmark/mile mark stands for by dividing by the average MPG for that tank - I only have 1 dataset at the moment, but after about 5 fill-ups I'm going to do some statistical magic to make my assumptions legit).

Anyway, when I left work on Friday, I was on tickmark 14 (that is 2 marks from the bottom of the gauge). I had hit 560 miles on the trip odo when the fuel gauge hit tickmark 16 and was at 566 miles by the time I got to work in the morning. The owner's manual says that I have a 1.2 gallon reserve. So, I figured I either have about a gallon of diesel left (more than enough to get home) or practically none left (in which case I'm fucked after I leave Darnestown, MD) depending on where VW decided to measure the "reserve" from. I needed to get 45 additional miles out of this tank of fuel to get home to the fueling station in town.

I only got 28. I noticed that I was losing power going up a hill just before Dickerson, so I downshifted into 3rd, but still no power. Fortunately, there is a pull off area at the top of the hill, so I put on my hazards, pushed in the clutch and coasted to the gravel. The car stalled shortly before I came to a stop. My geekish ways saved me from the predicament that my geekish ways got me into, though. I dumped the 2.25L of WVO+PowerService into the tank and after cranking about 3 times to purge the air from the system, the Rabbit started right up. I was hoping not to run the Rabbit on the mixture straight, but rather to dilute it with about 10 gallons of diesel, but what was I going to do?

It's worth noting that WVO exhaust smells almost exactly the same as biodiesel exhaust, which I didn't expect for some reason. A lot of people claim that the smell is reminiscent of french fries, but I've never seen it. The smell is distinctive, though. I was able to go the additional 13 miles to get home on the WVO and then fill up with 10.8 gallons of diesel. Including the WVO, I went 605.3 miles on 11.3 gallons of fuel (53 MPG).