Hyper Fuel Economy | Green Energy News

June 26, 2005 – Vol.10 No.14

HYPER FUEL ECONOMY.

Imagine a passenger car that got better than the equivalent of 12,000 miles per gallon on gasoline. Of course that car was about the size of go-kart, weighed about 66 pounds (30 kilograms), had room for one (and perhaps an iPod) and cruised at a blistering 20 miles per hour. A Prius could would demolish this car. A Hummer would squash it like a bug.

Still, while the car that now holds the world record for fuel economy will never be seen on an Interstate, it does prove that an ultra-high fuel economy car would be possible if more attention was given to lightweighting, aerodynamics, fuels, engines and propulsion systems.

Attention is the keyword here. The mileage champ in focus is PAC Car developed by student engineers at the Swiss Institute of Technology - ETH Zurich - as an engineering exercise to compete in the Shell Eco-Marathon. The 20 budding engineers that built PAC Car (as well as all the other students that built cars competing in the event ) can take their knowledge from the project and use it to focus their attention on real-world highly fuel efficient cars, trucks and buses of the future.

PAC Car runs on a hydrogen fuel cell providing power to two electric drive motors. In the event the one-seat car used only 1.02 grams of hydrogen to travel 20.68 kilometers (12.8 miles) at an average speed 30 kilometers per hour (about 19 miles per hour). All of this converts to the equivalent of 5385 miles on one liter of gasoline or about 12,673 miles per gallon. ( The energy equivalent of two gallons of gasoline would take you around the planet.) It was the mileage champ of the event .

The goal of the Shell Eco-marathon is to drive as far as possible using the least amount of energy. More than 200 vehicles entered the event which this year included a new category, UrbanConcept. Those vehicles are closer in a engineering sense to vehicles that could be street-worthy in an urban environment.

Visit PACCar at http://www.paccar.ethz.ch , the Shell Eco-marathon at http://www.shell.com/eco-marathon .