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When you look at the race results a few things stand out:

1. The winning entry beat the first runner up by a whopping 72%.
2. The only "big name" university represented in the 22 entrants (all listed in the results) is UC Berkeley and they were seventh place.
3. The only university outside of North America came in 18th place, and IIT, the darling of mainstream media like CBS "60 Minutes" didn't even compete (not that Caltech, MIT or CMU are any better for not having entered). Even so, congratulations to Dehli College of Engineering for competing.
4. The winning high school team from Evansville, Indiana, had the second best mileage out of all contenders including the universities.

The official rules (from here) document states the distance is 15.5km/9.6mi, consisting of six laps around a specified oval test track. There's an minimum average speed requirement of 24 kmph/15 mph and a maximum average speed of 40.23kmph/25mph, so real world conditions this is not.

"All vehicles must use the same base engine supplied to each entrant by Briggs & Stratton Corporation (Model 091202 Type1016E1A1001). The engine is air cooled, four cycle, with a 2.61 kw (3.5 horsepower) rating at 3600 rpm."

"The performance run will consist of each vehicle running six laps around a 2.6 km (1.6 mile) oval test track. The vehicle must achieve a minimum six lap average speed of 24 km/hr (15 mph). This means that each vehicle will be required to travel a total distance of 15.5 km (9.6 miles) in a maximum of 38.4 minutes. The vehicle must not exceed a single lap average speed of 25mph (40.23km). This means a vehicle must take longer than 3 minutes 50 seconds to complete each lap. Vehicles must be capable of ascending a 1 percent grade and descending a 7 percent grade."

http://www.sae.org/students/ copypaste remove this part inserted to avoid slashdotting superrules.pdf

According to the rules they were required to have an average speed between 15 and 25 mph (24-40.23 km/hr). They drive six laps for a total of 9.6 miles (15.5km).

Competition results, warning PDF http://www.sae.org/students/sm2006results.pdf

Indiana and a HS there too came in with high MPG, as did Laval in Quebec province.

I think he was actually loading the famed "Chicken Cannon"

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But really, what was the point of hacking livejournal? Did someone write some Linkin Park lyrics incorrectly and the hackers decided to correct them?

I'm still amazed that (AFAIK for the ÉTS) its budget is about one tenth to one fourth than the MITs. But eh, if your explanation is correct, I guess that just a little more work would have avoided this kind of performance for what, third year in a row if my memory serves me well? Only if you could do that : http://www.sae.org/news/releases/05ets_140teams.ht m Cheer up we're just a little jealous... and wish more students would come up here!

The first CVT patents date to roughly 1886, based on concepts developed by Leonardo Da Vinci. CVTs in automobiles date back to at least the 1950's. See these pages for more info:

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/cvt.htm
http://www.sae.org/automag/techbriefs_01-00/03.htm

Society of Automotive Engineers, retard.

Ignoring the quantity of his purchases, it *is* really annoying that so many different devices, presumably from different manufacturers, would all be so-festooned.

But what really irks me is the idiots who put blue lights all over their cars - usually silly little Honda cars with 3" diameter coffee can exhaust tips (despite the 1" diameter pipe coming from the puny little 1.6L engine).

Blue side markers, taillights, parking lights? Non-conformant with SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers, look closely at your taillight lenses) standardized coloring and therefore dangerous. Illegal. Police should be cracking down on these the way they used to crack down on 50's hot-rodders who were putting the blue dots into their red taillights.

LEDs (especially blue) on calipers, brake rotors, rims, windshield washer nozzles - what are you, stupid? It might have looked a little neat the first time someone did it, but now it's every home-boy who doesn't know how to put on a baseball cap who is doing it. Why would you spend your money being a brainless clone, when instead you could save it to put a real motor into your Civic? (Now, if you've got a Civic with a 4-bolt mains Chevy 350 under the hood, *then* I'll be impressed - takes a little more skill to do that than to put silly lights on the car.)

I wonder if this could be applied to cars and other "larger louder" things in the future.

This was actually on the board for the Dodge Viper. Because of the vehicles 10-cylinder engine, the exhaust note is more like a UPS truck than that of a sports car. The idea was that they were going to cancel the UPS truck noises and add (or simple allow) a more sports car-like sound. I was able to see/hear one of these test cars and it sounded remarkable.

Sorry Montgomery Burns, that would be a standard S.A.E. ton. I will try to be more clear in the future. ]:3}>

Mercedes is also already offering this. Apparently it works pretty well.

Well ... Pease is not well-known because it's most likely not true. I just double-checked on Google, and yes you're right that resources are abundant but they're far from unananimous or even supportive. (Interestingly, virtually all the pro-Pease sites are in Australia or New Zealand, suggesting an alternative conspiracy -- or merely the affliction of regional pride. I'm not a fan of hypothesized conspiracies.)

Pease appears to have left the ground, but he conceded it was uncontrolled and ended in a crash. He did not later pursue the "first flight" trophy, and it was one hotly desired. The flight is described as "undocumented" with widely varying estimates as to distance and such. Undocumented history means unreliable history, and of further suspicion is that his aircraft did not prove itself in the long run, either.

A question that interests me more than who was first is whose airplane led to productive development in aviation. That would be the Wright Flyer, though Europeans soon pulled far ahead. An odd bit of deja-vu is that engineers are looking again at Wright-style wing-warping (Java applet) as a method of controlling modern fighter jets. Also intriguing is the habit we all -- not just Americans -- have in taking nationalistic pride in the accomplishments of people we not only have never met, but who are quite dead.

Now, if you really want some baloney, it is NASA somehow taking credit for the first flight by celebrating it. When was NASA, or even NACA formed anyway? 1915?

I went to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry last year with some engineer friends of mine. We are all recent college grads, and found everything way too ordinary and "dumbed-down" to be interesting or educational. It's not their fault...it's a museum, and there's only so much they can display, only so much detail they can go into. But that's a problem I've had with almost any exhibit I've gone to see...the exhibitors don't have the time, money, or liability insurance to interactively display anything that's really interesting. Thus, the only interesting things I've really found have been participatory engineering organizations, like Formula SAE when I was in college and FIRST after I graduated. There are many of these types of engineering organizations out there to choose from. That's probably getting offtopic though...

I've been working on a project at Georgia Tech called FutureTruck, which is sponsored by the Department of Energy and some major automobile manufacturers. If you're interested, the website is here. GT is one of 15 schools from around the US and Canada that were tasked with taking a GM Suburban, a rather poor MPG performer but popular in today's market, and making it cleaner, more efficient, and (if possible) even more consumer-attractive.

Just a couple things I've noticed over the past 2 years of this project:

1. Fuel cell vehicles are still a ways off. The hydrogen containers are bulky and heavy, and a system still costs around $1 million.

2. Diesel/biodiesel looks promising but a few problems remain - more polluting than normal gasoline, different performance issues, and such. However, they are more efficient overall. Paired with an electric motor, diesel engines could turn out to be cleaner and more effective than gasoline-only vehicles.

3. Electric-only vehicles are very limited in range and scope. Batteries are still heavy, even the 'new' kinds of batteries like Lithium-Ion. Combined with the need for a charging/recharging infrastructure, and the (at least) American desire for power, the electric-only vehicle will likely be relegated to shuttle cars on a set path.

4. Hybrids, like diesel-electric or gasoline-electric, seem to be the wave of the near future. I believe all the schools participating in FutureTruck are using a hybrid system of some sort. The Honda Insight is a good example of a production car that is a hybrid vehicle. It can reach about 70 MPG after a bit of driver training/getting-used-to. There are an array of configurations and methodologies for hybrid systems that I won't get into here, due to space considerations. But I believe, and so do a lot of other schools and even car manufacturers, that hybrids will pave the way in the near future. Beyond that... maybe they'll have fusion power worked out by then. ;)

I hope this helps some of you out with what's going on in the alternative fuels/powertrain area. I am by no means an authority on this subject, so visit the Department of Energy, the Argonne National Laboratories, and the Society for Automotive Engineers websites for much more detailed information. Those websites are here, here, and here respectively.

I made a typo: 10K mpg is roughly 4 Km/L. Also, I intended to include The SAE Supermileage Competition page

Th rest of my previous post stands.

This article is being modded up to 4-5?

Damn, I can remember when geeks had some hint of a clue about math or science.

The author opens with a claim that Shell Oil has a competition where cars run on "standard petroleum" -- maybe a diesel could run on pure petroleum, but that's the stuff that comes out of the ground, not out of fuel pumps. That's a hint that he's clueless.

Further he claims 10K+ miles/per gallon (40K+ kilometers per liter) That's 200x most production high economy cars, and 100x the target for the ultra economy cars. In order for this to even be thermodynamically possible, the efficiency of today's cars would have to be under 1%.

Don't we even have some intuitive sense of the general amount of energy in burning gasoline? And the amount of work involved in moving things on Earth. Think!!! Halfway around the Earth on a gallon? Do you really believe that? (10K mpg is trivial in space, of course) Think of the amount of enrgy required to lift a car over even a modest hill.

Well the guys working on Society of Automotive Engineers competitions sure haven't seemed to have heard of it. Even their most highly compromised, highly optimized vehicles don't come close. Ultralight, ultrafragile shells on bicycle/tricycle frames with a total vehicle weight in the *tens* of pounds (see some pictures) can achieve many hundreds of mpg -- at 15 mpg on a track with no uphills greater than 1%.

Actually, if you read the SAE competition rules, you'll see that these vehicles are not capable of cruising most campuses. They are too underpowered to climb any hill that you can't coast over at 15-16 mpg. (a modest speed on an ordinary bicycle)