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The car is based on a kit car from: http://www.k-1attack.com/
The car uses a 200 VW 1.9L TDi engine powering the rear wheels.
It also has an unknown (to me, anyway) electric motor for the front wheels.

Here are some links for it:
The school's "photo blog" http://evteam.gambitdesign.com/gallery/albums.php
A write-up from last fall: http://www.autoblog.com/2005/08/15/hybrid-attack/

http://evteam.gambitdesign.com/gallery/attack_buil d

Some items not mentioned in the original article.

This is a lightweight Kit Car with a VW TDI engine driving the rear wheels and an electic motor driving the front wheels. Unlikely that the electrics do anything but boost accelleration. 50MPG is not unheard of for a VW TDI without electic assist.

Neat that kids did it, but it is no surprise that if you build an ultra lightweight hybrid diesel with hybrid, that you will get great mileage/accelleration. The challenge car companies face is making the weight in the regulatory framework and still making it practical enough to own. This is all but impossible.

What we really need is some change in regulations to allow lightweight city cars to exist, so we can get great gas mileage.

The high school kids have a website and picture/video gallery. The kids didn't build the car from scratch; it is a kit car based on a Honda Accord chassis. It uses a 1.9L VW TDi (Turbo Direct Injection) diesel (200hp) engine as its main power source driving the rear wheels, and has a 200hp electric motor attached to the front wheels. The electric motor is driven by a bank of ultracapacitors, so it has excellent power for short bursts of acceleration, but when not accelerating the vehicle is powered solely by the turbocharged diesel, so the mileage figure is the same as what you would get if it was not a hybrid (actually it would probably be better, especially since it doesn't do regenerative braking AFAIK).

An Attack racing kit costs about $20,000 (plus shipping, tax, import fees) plus you need a 1990-93 Accord. The resulting car is not street legal, and certainly not very comfortable. You can buy them preassembled, much more comfortable, and street legal for Europe for $70,000 but they're not hybrids and not stripped-down racing kits so likely heavier. Not sure how much the turbo diesel, electric motor, and ultracapacitors cost.

Ultracapacitors are very cool technology; IMHO they are likely to come out of the wings, completely replace batteries in almost all applications, and finally produce a viable traditional fully electric car long before fuel cells are ready. Ultracapacitors are already on a Moore's-law-like curve, and nanotech seems poised to help them jump ahead even faster. Ultracapacitors are ideal for car powerplant duty: they can discharge any amount of energy up to their total stored at a moment's notice; they can recharge *just as fast* as they discharge, and they do not degrade in performance with use. They are immune to shock and temperature extremes. There are no chemical reactions involved, so little excess heat and no dangerous gases are generated under any load and there is little danger of chemical leaks.

Ultracapacitors have only recently become practical for applications like this, which is perhaps why we haven't seen any developments quite like this yet from the lumbering car industry. But I would expect to start seeing ultracapacitor-boosted hybrids fairly soon, and I would also expect completely ultracapacitor-powered cars, with no other onboard power plant, in 10-20 years.

--derek

gambitdesign.com

We're doing this in an enterprise environment, but it would be easy to co-ordinate between two friends as well.

--derek

gambitdesign.com

If you're willing to spend a little money, then you can get exactly what you want. We have a package specifically designed for families, and we'll set up any PHP/perl script on there that you want. You can have calendars, photo albums, forums, web-manageable news, and pretty much whatever else you want, and the package includes registration of the domain name you want, so you could get yourlastname.com or similar, then give everyone in your family an email address @yourlastname.com

Pay for hosting. It's not really all that expensive, and you can do something which benefits your entire family. Set up a family portal that can have calendars, news, photo albums, forums, and give everybody in your family an email address. It's a nice thing to have, and worth the money.

I really don't think that this is something that people only want to use locally. If you want that, then just copy all your pictures to a directory on your computer and let the automatic thumbnailing do the work for you. Most people want others to be able to see their pictures though - share with friends and family. That's really what Gallery and other programs are designed for. We offer a hosting option just for this, so a family can set up and share all of their digital pictures. It's so much nicer and easier than getting 35mm prints made, and sending people a couple doubles. Now you have a virtually infinite number of copies that people anywhere in the world can see, and you can generate high quality prints from an online shop, or just stick some photo paper in your inkjet and get an equivalent.