February 23rd, 2009
By John DeFore
Green Right Now
Most of us would love to find a car that got 75 miles per gallon. 150 mpg would make us think we’d died and gone to high-efficiency heaven. But thousands of miles per gallon?
That’s the goal of a group of students at Halifax, Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University, who have already cruised hundreds of miles on a single gallon of juice. Of course, they’re not driving sedans: The mechanical engineering team led by Matthew Harding have built sleek, Kevlar-coated shells that can barely carry a full-sized human being, much less two sacks of groceries and a car seat for your kid.
Their latest design, which they call the “Maritime Mileage Machine,” is an entry in a contest held by Shell Oil: The Eco-Marathon Americas will take place this April in California, bestowing a $5,000 grand prize on the team that can “design, build and drive the farthest using the least amount of energy.” (Insert your own ironic comment here about such a contest being sponsored by a company whose considerable fortunes have thus far been derived from fossil fuels.)
Dalhousie’s Harding admits his team’s car isn’t going to take the Road & Track crowd by storm: “It’s basically a big weed whacker,” he says of the vehicle’s 35-cc engine. But then, a muscle-car looks just as puny, efficiency-wise, when compared to his: the team’s current mileage record is 420 kilometers per liter (remember, we’re talking about Canadian engineers here), compared to the average car’s rating of around 13 km/l.
(Translation: The car would get more than 68 miles per gallon.)
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