To ride with him is to get intimate with the restraint of a seat belt and be more grateful for it then ever before. Claiming the passenger seat of his car is testing the fate of not being blessed with nine lives and calculating the end equation of lucky stars. At arm's distance, from the mantle of the dashboard, he careens through the streets of Los Angeles in a 1983 Mercedes Benz. For once in his life, the speed at which he goes no longer exists only to break laws. The speed at which that bulk of German metal peels through traffic is the driving force behind Jeffery Phillips' new life endeavor: to get clean and to be a better man.
For the past 10 years Phillips has survived off being the black sheep of L.A. The canvas of his body is smothered in tattoo ink. He has the permanent outline of a single teardrop etched beneath his left eye. Notoriously referred to under the moniker of "Shady," Phillips made a killing off slick cajolery and a well defined jawline. But after falling from the charm of infamous grace Phillips crept out of Hollywood's limelight and disappeared for two years. On Sept. 6, 2007, the day of his 29th birthday, he re-emerged from the shadows and opened Los Angeles Bio Cars, a company dedicated to producing fuel efficient and environmentally safe automobiles.
"I wasted all these years doing nothing good and was just going to end up dead and hollow," Phillips said. "Ten years living off my image ... really contributing to the greater good of humanity there."
So, with the space for a shop purchased in Pasadena, Phillips began a new career converting diesel powered engines into motors that could run on vegetable oil.
It's a fairly new idea in the automotive field, but he already had two well-established competitors in the Southern California area: Veggie Wheels and Lovecraft. But in true dissenting style, Phillips wasn't about to arrive back on the scene without breaking a few rules. The first was to give all cars the potential to use environmentally safe fuel. That meant getting his hands on gasoline powered engines and modifying them into diesels. From there, he could alter them to be vegetable oil-compatible. Once he converted the cylinder engines to turbine engines, Phillips began fine tuning more of the tricks he had under his hood. He now hacks hybrids and works on them to produce 100 plus miles per gallon.
"These are the cars car companies should be making but aren't because of politics and money," Phillips said.
David Graf, president of Cal State Fullerton's Society of Automotive Engineers, has never heard of anyone doing what Phillips is doing so successfully. After driving a 1988 biodiesel-fueled Volkswagen Rabbit for a few years, Graf is well-versed in the technicalities of fuel efficiency. He would take the grease from the willing hands of a local McDonald's and run the oil through a filtration system before filling up his tank.
"The engine runs off regular gas until the vegetable oil reaches 160 degrees in the tank," Graf explained. "Once it's the right temperature and switches over, you can smell the french fries."
Graf went on to run down a list of creative fuel alternatives people are working on such as ammonia-powered engines and electric motor kits, but he's yet to hear of anything like Phillips' formerly gasoline-fueled cars accelerating on vegetable oil.
Phillips has never owned a business, let alone taken on a enterprise that challenged conventional thinking and economic power struggles. He's become a specialist in carbon efficiency and worked as an adviser to an assembly, which is changing the 70-year-old red tape laws that have kept biodiesel under the taxes that are applied to hazardous-petroleum based fuels. Since Phillips opened his shop in September, the owner of his competitor, Veggie Wheels, has asked him to take over the company and L.A. Bio Cars will soon be opening shop in Inglewood.
"He's finally up to some good," Andrew Schwarz, a friend and client of Jeff's, said half joking, half completely serious. "It's the brighter side of Shady Jeff."
His converted dust-blue Mercedes stands as a testament to the history he's trying to shake. His script-decorated knuckles let the wheel gently graze in rotation under his fingers. Like that beloved vintage coupe, Phillips' charlatan paint job hasn't changed. They still own that unmistakable framework, but the organs at work beneath are running off something a little more pure. And where ever they decide to go, whatever route they take, both get there at a speed no one can touch.
