Student-Designed Supermileage Vehicle Gets 1,300 Miles Per Gallon
A group of seven Brigham Young University engineering students have built a lightweight, aerodynamic vehicle to compete at the SAE Supermileage Competition. The annual event, which is being held June 6-7 in Marshal, MI, determines which university has created the most fuel-efficient vehicle in North America. The BYU students' vehicle is 99 lbs - just big enough to fit one person - and can get can get more than 1,300 miles per gallon of fuel. Because it is a high-mileage vehicle, it only goes up to 25 mph. During the competition, each team is given about 20 grams of fuel to race around a ten-mile track. Each car has to average 15 mph during the run, and afterwards the fuel tank is re-measured to see how much fuel was used.
Transcript
00:00:02 Our car has a high compression engine. Optimum aerodynamic design with minimum drag. A marginal design for a quick repair. Our car has professionally thermoformed windows for optimal visibility. Blistering speeds up to... twenty-five miles per hour. Our car, you know, is a very small car The car doesn't go very fast because it's a high mileage vehicle so you actually get better gas mileage if you're going slower so we only drive about fifteen miles an hour on average.
00:00:35 Yeah you can say the Tortise and the Hare story is relative to our team because we're not the hare; This is definitely a tortoise car. It goes very slow. What's different about this car as opposed to other race cars is that it's built to get the highest gas mileage not necessarily the highest speed. This car achieves a fuel economy of over 1300 miles per gallon. So this is how big our fuel bottle is. It only holds a little amount of fuel. But we don't need much to go the far distances that we're planning on going. To get about 1300 miles per gallon we only use about 20 grams of fuel, which is about 20 paper clips. We do something called the Burn N' Coast method So we turn the car on and
00:01:17 accelerate, and then just cut the engine and coast for as long as you can. and then do it again...It looks like it does because of 2 things. First off, we want it to be really aerodynamic, so it kind of looks like a fish and it also looks like this because I have to drive it lying down. The car is also very lightweight , it weighs less 100 pounds so I weigh more than the car does when we drive. That's a little bit embarrassing but we're trying to get over it. rules state that the driver has to weigh at least 130 pounds. If the driver weighs less than that, you have to bring extra weight onto your car. Designed by 7 awesome engineering students from BYU.