think or thwim

If you’ve never seen this car and you’re like me you’re thinking two things right now:

Thing 1: 12,000 miles per gallon? Bullshit. This guy is either an idiot or can’t type.
Thing 2: That looks like a bad-ass car.

Well, I can type. This car go goes from bad-ass to cute in 0.37 seconds, and it does it at 12,665 mpg (5,385 kilometers per liter).

The power plant is a hydrogen fuel cell providing electricity to two motors that drive the rear wheel. It weighs 66 lbs, or roughly 1/100th of a Hummer. Driving it looks to be somewhat like spending time in an airplane restroom, minus the blue water.

This car was built specifically for the Shell Eco-Marathon. Every year college and high school students compete to see who can squeeze the most distance out of a gallon of gas. The rules require at least a 15 mile per hour average for 10 miles. Most teams employ a strategy of running the engine to accelerate up to 20 mph, then turning it off and coasting until the car slows to 10 mph where they start it again.

The race started in 1939 with a friendly wager between employees of Shell Oil’s research laboratory in Wood River, Illinois. There are now three races: France, UK, and US.

Here are some pictures from last years races and a few amazing facts from the Strathclyde University Team’s website:

The Concorde used as much fuel to get to the end of the runway as a Shell Eco-Marathon car would use to travel three times around the equator.

If Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari Formula One car was as economical as a Shell Eco-Marathon car, using one gallon of fuel he could complete over three seasons of Formula One racing without stopping for fuel.

The average person’s fuel bill for a year would be less than £5 if they were to use a Shell Eco-Marathon car.

A Shell Eco-Marathon car would be able to drive a distance equal to that of Earth to the Moon on a full fuel tank from a large car/commercial vehicle.

The winner gets a whopping $10,000 prize…. Come on! Darpa puts up a $2,000,000 prize to develop a robot driven vehicle so the Army will be able to use it to kill people.

I have two questions:

1. Where is the eco-marathon for cars with cabins large enough to regular sized people to sit upright?
2. Why aren’t car companies using the stuff like lighter seats and tires with 30% less rolling resistance that make these cars efficient? I was thinking the seats probably don’t wear well and the tires are too slick in the rain, but then I found out that Greenpeace modified a Renault to achieve double the US average efficiency. Greenpeace! If a bunch of hippies can get 78 mpg, why can’t a bunch of guys with pocket protectors get into the triple digits?

:: Urban Planning :: Cleantech

cars, eco marathon, efficiency, fuel cells, hydrogen, pac car