Classic flexes green muscle
You’d be forgiven for thinking that in its first environmental special, MTV’s often tongue-in-cheek “Pimp My Ride” might simply paint an old car bright green and use woven grass for the floor mats.
But part of being outrageous -- one of the popular show’s primary goals each week -- is being able to surprise.
Rick Hurvitz, the show’s 35-year-old executive producer and co-creator, believes that will be the case Sunday when “Pimp” -- in this use the term means to extravagantly and excessively over-decorate something -- gets a bit serious in an Earth Day special featuring a biodiesel muscle car.
The car started out as a rust-pocked 1965 Chevrolet Impala with broken windows, missing chrome, torn upholstery, weathered blue paint and an engine that dripped oil.
But after four weeks of extensive work, that old beater is now dressed in bright red paint with wide white racing stripes. The chrome is bright, all the headlamps and taillights are intact and the interior, from a distance, looks like a stock upholstery job.
The only modifications to the car’s body are a slight lift, to help clear the 18-inch custom wheels, and a monstrous power bulge atop the hood.
It’s what’s under that bulge, a massive turbocharged diesel engine that runs on canola oil, that gives the car the requisite degree of outrageousness.
The alternative-fuel power plant, along with upholstery made of renewable hemp fiber and carpeting from recycled plastic bottles, provides the Impala’s “green” credentials.
The delight of “Pimp My Ride” is the often over-the-top treatments the team comes up with. Such touches may include $40,000 of aggressively oversize chrome wheels, 40-inch-screen plasma TVs and eardrum-bursting sound systems, all stuffed into a 20-year-old student’s third-hand Honda Civic sedan.
“We usually try for ridiculous excess,” Hurvitz said.
But what will appear when the show’s Earth Day special begins airing at 1 p.m. Sunday is an almost reverential treatment of a classic Impala SS. “A car anyone would be proud to drive,” Hurvitz said.
It might help to be a little crazy too.
The 6.6-liter Duramax diesel V-8 engine from General Motors Corp. was extensively modified by Fullerton-based Pacific Performance Engineering to produce as much as 800 horsepower. All that might will be on display in a drag-racing segment in which the Impala takes on a $200,000 Lamborghini Gallardo in a quarter-mile run.
When the car is returned to its owner, a North Hollywood resident identified only as Kristoffer, the tuning will be tamped down to a more manageable 400 horsepower.
(The show provides anonymity to the owners, Hurvitz said, so would-be thieves can’t easily track them down when they take home a pimped-out car stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars of electronics and fancy wheels and tires.)
But despite all those horses under the hood, the car will still run on vegetable oil, a fuel conversion masterminded by 35-year-old Jonathan Goodwin. His Hline Conversions in Wichita, Kan., specializes in making better citizens out of GM’s Hummer sport utility vehicles by converting them to diesel and biodiesel and more than doubling their fuel economy to about 25 miles per gallon.
As part of the special, “Mad Mike” Martin, who oversees the program’s customizing at Galpin Auto Sports in Van Nuys, hosts a segment in Seattle, where Imperium Renewables Inc. turns canola seed into the vegetable oil the renewed Impala now burns.
It’s a fuel so clean that there was barely a whiff of odor when the car’s engine was repeatedly revved up in a closed garage during a recent interview with the program’s principals.
Goodwin said the Impala should deliver fuel economy “in the mid-20-mpg area” despite its oversize engine.
“A car like this isn’t for everybody,” he said. “But by doing it we are showing that you can have power and be environmentally friendly by using fuel from renewable resources.”
For Hurvitz, the Earth Day show -- with a special introduction by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- is all about reaching out to an audience of 20-to-30-year-olds with a message disguised as entertainment.
“We’re saying that the future is now, that it is time to change things -- and, by the way, you can still have fun doing it.”
For hard-core “Pimp” fans, some of that fun is in the Impala’s trunk.
It won’t carry much luggage anymore, because it is stuffed with a 550-watt entertainment package featuring five television screens, as well as one of the show’s trademark audio systems. It’s all mounted, however, in a fitted cabinet made from recycled old-growth lumber and wrapped in hemp fabric.
