Another engineer, Adrian Bennett, fitted a jet engine to his C5, while plumber Colin Furze turned one into a 5 ft (1.5 m -high "m -high trike" with 2 feet wheels and a petrol engine capable of propelling it at 40 monster
The next Picanto will be offered with 1.0 and 1.2-litre petrol engines; variants capable of running on bioethanol or LPG will be sold in certain national markets.
That body conceals a plug-in petrol hybrid drive-train capable of powering the Active Tourer for almost twenty miles in electric-only mode after a top-up from the mains.
The V64V engine had the additional benefit of being very economical for such a powerful petrol engine, it was capable of achieving 32 mpgimp, in contrast, the smallest-engined Jaguar saloon of the time, the Jaguar XJ6 4.0 could only achieve around 24 mpgimp.
Their favourites are still the good old petrol and diesel engines, which remain capable of further improvement.
Ethanol output has more than doubled since 2002, thanks to the development of flex-fuel engines for cars, capable of running on either petrol or ethanol indistinguishably.
And they are years away from integrating the various steps from capturing the sunlight in the first place to producing the finished fuel into working prototypes, let alone commercial-sized factories capable of producing something resembling petrol.
The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant capable of producing a ton of petrol a day.
Fiat-Chrysler is especially keen: all its Fiat-branded cars now have a dual-fuel option, with engines capable of being switched between CNG and petrol.
Stokes had clear and sensible ideas about the cars required, not overly cheap but "small, comfortable, fairly sophisticated, and capable of doing a lot of miles to a gallon of petrol".
