2,487.5 mpg! Catchy headline unneccessary
by Nik Bristow on Mar 29th 2010 at 6:01PM
For the second year in a row, the student team from Laval University in Quebec, Canada took home the $5,000 top prize in a worst-to-first finish at the Shell Eco-marathon Americas. In case you missed the headline, their winning entry in the “Prototype” category returned 2,487.5 miles per gallon. We find it incredibly thrilling to report mpg ratings that require a comma so we’re going to write it again: 2,487.5 mpg. Wow.
This year’s Eco-marathon Americas began Saturday, March 27th with 42 teams on the Houston, TX road course gunning for Team Laval University’s 2009 record of 2,757.1 mpg. The event has two entry categories: the “Prototype” category aims for maximum efficiency without regard to actual real-world driveability – and allows those amazing mpg resulte. The “UrbanConcept” category encourages entrants to construct vehicles that are closer to fulfilling the needs of an actual road-going consumer. This year’s UrbanConcept winner was Mater Dei High School in Evansville, IN. Team Mater Dei took the grand prize for the second year in a row by pulling down 437.2 mpg. The winning vehicles in both the Prototype and the UrbanConcept categories used combustion engines.
Here is the full article.
Per gallon of what? Rocket fuel?
No. Baby seal blood.
Challenge to anyone reading this: try to find any scrap of information whatsoever on the web about how exactly the student teams are able to achieve these mileage figures 1-2 orders of magnitude better than production cars or even motorcycles. I tried and failed. A sad testament to the ability of the web to replicate the same detail-less fluff thousands of times over while burying the interesting details (that might, e.g., stimulate the mind of some random engineer from GM or Toyota while reading it and open the door to real progress).