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Students Build 2752 MPG Hypermiling Vehicle
MikeChino sends along this awe-inspiring excerpt: "Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive? Try this on for size: a group of mechanical engineering students at Cal Poly have developed a vehicle that can get up to 2752.3 MPG — and it doesn't even use batteries. The Cal Poly Supermileage Team's wondercar, dubbed the Black Widow, has been under construction since 2005. The 96 pound car has three wheels, a drag coefficient of 0.12, a top speed of 30 MPH, and a modified 3 horsepower Honda 50cc four-stroke engine. It originally clocked in at 861 MPG and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today." It's not quite as street-worthy, though, as Volkswagen's 235 MPG One-Liter concept. Updated 20:01 GMT: The Cal Poly car's earlier incarnation achieved 861 MPG, not MPH; corrected above.
Really?
Pfft.
Not even proofsniffed.
It originally clocked in at 861 MPH and has been continuously tweaked to achieve the mileage we see today.
Not only eco-friendly, it leaves some fighter aircraft in the dust! How do they prevent the sonic boom?
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I'm not that impressed. I mean, while the figure mentioned seems impressive, how is this 'research' helpful? I mean, we already have *known* for a very long time that if you made a super small, lightweight vehicle with excellent aerodynamics, very low top-speed, and very low torque/accelleration, you can get much more mileage than the typical car. But, nobody wants a vehicle like that. People want vehicles very much like what they already have. . . enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.
I honestly think these 'toy car' concepts, while they might be great learning exercises for engineering students, aren't very impressive. I'd be much more impressed by the 80-100 MPG 4-door sedan.
Is the 96-pound figure without fuel? I wonder how much it weight fully loaded.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Think claims of electric vehicles that get over 200 MPG are impressive?
How about infinite miles per gallon? Electric cars don't consume gas.
Hypermiling is interesting, but totally useless. It's not even that interesting from an engineering standpoint because it's the answer to a question that nobody has asked: "How do I get amazing mileage in a way that is completely and totally infeasible to actually implement?" Now, if they were doing aeronautic hypermiling, that would be interesting, because the vehicles in question need not interfere with other vehicles. But hypermiling techniques involve acceleration and coasting, and every vehicle would need its own road to take advantage of them without screwing up everyone else's mileage and decreasing everyone's safety. Even typical hybrid drivers create a road hazard by paying too much attention to their MPG readout; not due to their inattention to the road, but because they are slowing down excessively while going up hills, causing drivers behind them to have to leave their powerband and downshift to a less-efficient gear ratio to maintain it. Every time I see a Prius I pass it at the earliest opportunity so as not to be stuck behind it and have to suffer their inconsideration, often consuming additional fuel in the process. A hybrid might get better mileage, but as they are typically driven, they cause worse mileage; and they provably consume more energy over the course of their lifetime than a comparable vehicle with a small diesel engine and no batteries which gets the same or even superior mileage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not to steal their thunder (and this mpg result is old news), but according to their own blog, Universite Laval got 2757 mpg in that race. And Mater Dei High School hold the record with 2,843.4 mpg.
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Maybe someone would care if the vehicle had some practical applications.
This car used to do even more mpg, but wasnt very fast.
The gas would evaporate from the tank faster than that! I think someone needs to check their figures. Unit conversion FTW??
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
You know. Most of those things look really, REALLY uncool. This one, with a bit of work, comes close to a batmobile. Not bad at all.
Of course, let’s see how it does as a 4-person+dog car going at 80 mph in a crash situation.
It’s always much easier do do all this at low speeds and loads.
My guess: 2752 mpg / 5 seats / (80 mph / 30 mph) = 206.4 mpg. ^^
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Can it haul my giant bass boat?
Bubba
This might be useful for mail carriers, meter maids, farm vehicles, etc. Might also be useful for someone exploring a remote area where a gas pump might not be readily available
Or is it so optimized that they use an eye dropper to feed this thing seven drops of gasoline and extrapolate how far it would have traveled if it really had a gallon of fuel? I mean if you have to stop every mile to refuel, they might easily build a rubber band powered vehicle that gives infinite miles per gallon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I find it ironic that you can get a fairly standard HPV (http://www.recumbents.com/home/) that'll let you go faster than 30mph just using pedal power.
Deleted
city driving?
is this a good time to say whooshas? :)
They're claiming to have a 12 inch cock but it only fucks 1 inch at a time.
3 horse power 50cc honda build with a top speed of about 30 MPH? That sounds like the engin they use on their scooters. I have 4 of them and they run for ever. Without any modifications or hypermileing they will get between 70 and 100 mpg.
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MPG is backwards. It tells you how much further you can go on a single gallon, not how much less fuel it'll take to cover a fixed distance. In practical terms, the latter is much more relevant to how people drive. If you buy a car which gets twice the MPG, you do not suddenly start driving twice as far every day. Your miles driven each day will probably remain fixed, so fuel saved is based on the inverse of MPG.
A consequence of this is that MPG exaggerates the benefit of highly fuel-efficient vehicles. 2752 MPG sounds like a lot. But switching from a 25 MPG vehicle to a 50 MPG vehicle saves you more gas than switching from a 50 MPG vehicle to a 2752 MPG vehicle. To cover a distance of 50 miles, the 25 MPG vehicle would consume 2 gallons. The 50 MPG vehicle would consume 1 gallon, for a savings of 1 gallon. The 2752 MPG vehicle would consume 0.018 gallons, for a savings of 0.982 gallons. This is less improvement than the switch from 25 MPG to 50 MPG. Because MPG is inverted, a 10 MPG improvement on a 25 MPG vehicle saves a lot more fuel than a 10 MPG improvement on a 2000 MPG vehicle.
Consequently, the most important thing for reducing overall fuel consumption is to get people out of gas guzzlers and into more fuel efficient vehicles. Stuff like hypermiling vehicles getting >2000 MPG are interesting from an engineering and design standpoint, but they serve little practical use. Even if you could develop a real car which got 2000 MPG, getting a single SUV driver to switch to a Prius would save 3.5x as much fuel as getting a single Prius driver to switch to this new ultra-high MPG vehicle.
This is why most of the rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km. It makes the amount of fuel your car will use for a typical drive pretty obvious, and makes it dirt simple to compare how much fuel you'll save switching to a different vehicle (just subtract the two numbers):
SUV = 16 liters/100 km
sedan = 9.4 liters/100 km
Prius = 4.7 liters/100 km
vehicle in article = 0.085 liters/100 km
I think I like the 861 MPH better... "If my calculations are correct, when this baby gets up to 861 MPH, you're going to see some serious stuff" ... CRASH! KABOOM!
the speed limit for the centre of Dublin, Ireland, is slower than that - 30KPH.
so the car may be slow for most people, but would be ideal for Dubliners.
In 1992, UC Davis students working under Professor Andy Frank achieved 3313 mpg with its SideFX and Shamu. The school later developed some of the first hybrid car technology, among other things.
http://books.google.com/books?id=OeMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=uc+davis+side+fx&source=bl&ots=yNnL_bcwLY&sig=hhexAD2-JnRF_cp2YeJRXn20AVI&hl=en&ei=DVCAS-GrI4zgswOL7-SHBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CB8Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=uc%20davis%20side%20fx&f=false
One must begin to wonder about the absolutely awe inspiring ability of some people to miss the point.
I got the point. They get insane gas efficiency with a toy vehicle. What I dont get is how they get away with such an incredible misunderstanding of the basics within their "look at us" article.
Next up, the Moyes Litespeed 4-S gets over 1 trillion miles per gallon.
"His name was James Damore."
These things average about 15 mph and top out at 30. I have better performance than that on my bike (at least when I'm in shape) I would be willing to bet I could very easily out accelerate this thing on my bike as well.
what sig?
Shell's got quite an impressive challenge running for many years, achieving way more than 2750 mpg on a regular basis : http://www.shell.com/home/content/ecomarathon/about/current_records/
>>>Instead of something that putters around at 30mph and bores its driver to death
Well to each his own. My Honda Insight may be "boring" when I'm driving it only 55 (the Pres. Carter speed limit), but being able to drive to work and back on only $2.00 is a pretty good deal. (It averages over 90 MPG for me.) Even if I speed along at 80mph, it still gets a decent 60 MPG, so no complaints either way.
We need more cars like this, not less, and if I had the opportunity I'd buy this Caltech car (after it's made roadworthy) or the Volkswagen 240 MPG car or the Volkswagen 88 MPG Lupo 3L. I enjoy saving money, and I don't need a Ford Living Room SUV just to go to hell..... er, I mean work and back.
BTW where is that Volkswagen 240 MPG car? They were supposed to make a production model for 2010, but still no sign of it. :-|
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
P.S. For comparison this prototype car is 3 hp and 50 cc. My Honda is 70hp and the VW Lupo is 60hp - at approximately 1000 cc each.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
But this car is one that the driver sits in, the other cars have the driver laying on their back. This car seems a little more practical to me for that reason.
Mass doesn't protect you in an accident.
You're other points aside, it kinda does. Put a ping-pong ball on a pool table. Roll it briskly at the cue ball. What happens? Now do the reverse. Roll the cue ball at the ping pong ball. Now get a friend to help. Roll the two into each other. What happens? Imagine little people living in each ball. What kind of forces are the subject to?
One of the things keeping light weight vehicles from becoming popular are the heavy weight vehicles on the roads. (No, I'm not referring to professionally driven working vehicles.) In the event of a collision, a heavier vehicle isn't likely to change direction as suddenly or as sharply (and has more "material" that can be designed as cushion to boot). Yes, it may lead to greater injuries outside the heavy vehicle, but it still provides more protection to the person inside. My mom, for one, absolutely refuses to consider buying any car lighter than the average sedan for exactly this reason.
(It feels weird making a non-car analogy for a vehicular scenario - as opposed to the reciprocal.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I've long dreamed about a vehicle like this while walking to school. Well, except mine was hybrid pedal powered, but nonetheless, the form factor looks roughly the same as what I had envisioned. I became a mechanical engineer in order to work on stuff like this; however in the DC area the only jobs I've been able to snag were relatively boring defense programming drivel. Someday... when I move far away and can have a garage and setup a shop...
I have heard of several instances where someone bought a brand new vehicle and they got very good mileage. I full size truck doing around 40 mpg. The owner gets a call from the manufacturer and they say there's a problem with his truck and he needs to bring it in. He brings it in, and since then the truck does normal mileage - around 17-19. Has anyone else heard of this, or experienced it?
Because city planners in the US are clueless about where and how to use them. Additionally, drivers here can't wrap their heads around the concept. We have a few roundabouts where I live, and they're nightmarish. I really wish they'd left the stop signs there.
I'm only generally against roundabouts. I could come up with places and ways to use them, but I've yet to see a good, safe, efficient roundabout in actual use. Besides, I doubt most city planners know what a roundabout is. I can only imagine the turmoil that would ensue if that changed.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Your car that gets 2000MPG at 30MPH just became the new carbon offset target wet dream.
The numbers this car introduces skew everything everyone knew about efficiencies derivatives, which is little.
Imagine the dark twisty passages of the Excel spreadsheets forcing action in D.C. and the monkeywrench this could introduce. Hooray.
Using imperial units on the headline? Well, ok.
But NOT using it on the news? Oh fuck.
I still have not the faintest idea of what they've accomplished.
The problem is, "making it roadworthy" will ruin their numbers. Let's go into the gory details, shall we?
First off, take a look at those front wheels. Notice something? How about *a lack of ability to make relevant turns*? Note that it only holds one passenger, and that's being generous. Not even the slightest bit of comfort or safety features. It's rolling along on overinflated bicycle tires. And it gets its performance at speeds where aerodynamic drag is basically zero, with no stops and starts.
In short, you simply cannot get numbers anything like that in any sort of realistic driving.
If you want to see what sort of mileage you can get in a semi-normal vehicle, the Aptera 2e is probably as good a case study as you can get. It's also a case study of a board of directors ruining a company by bringing in a lousy leadership team, but that's neither here nor there. The idea was to get two people and a reasonable amount of cargo around in a comfortable, affordable vehicle with as little energy as possible and without sacrifice to safety. To do this, they threw all *normal* conventions of style and what a vehicle should be out the window and let physics optimize it. The drag coefficient clocked in at 0.15 -- not much more than this vehicle (but with all of the things needed for "normal" vehicles, such as stability and the ability to make sharp turns and the like). But to hold two people in comfort and carry a reasonable amount of cargo, the cross sectional area has to be *way* bigger. Not as big as many cars, but still way bigger than this. Also, the affordability requirement led them to use a fiberglass/VE/foam core structure instead of carbon fiber/epoxy/foam core, which would be a little lighter. The notably larger size meant notably more total material, and the need for the ability to survive crashes and rollovers increased it still. Nonetheless, the shell was only a fraction of the 1500 pounds that the vehicle ended up at. The Aptera team tried to trim weight everywhere possible -- even using an aircraft-style wiring harness. But all of the subsystems we demand in a vehicle led the weight to grow. Also, the battery pack (since it's electric) added a couple hundred pounds, although not nearly as much as the pack in most EVs (due to the efficiency). The gasoline vehicle would be lighter, but not as much as you might expect if you want it to actually be able to have even *remotely* acceptable performance; small ICEs kind of suck in terms of power output (as well as running worse)
Anyway, all in all, the vehicle ended up being able to do 120 miles at a steady 55mph on ~10kWh. That's nearly three times as efficient as a Prius. The plug-in hybrid version was predicted to average 130mpg combined in charge-sustaining mode.
Since then, under the new management a lot of the streamlining and weight reduction has been thrown out the window, and its energy use keeps creeping up -- although still nothing like a normal car. And now the company is nearly broke, since the new CEO hasn't raised a dime in the past year and a half (unlike the old team, which raised over $30m). A tragic end to an amazing vehicle.
So, when you see these claims of thousands of MPGs, look at the Aptera as an example of what happens when you try to turn such a vehicle into a real car. What could be improved over the Aptera design? Not much, but there are some things. You could use carbon fiber and epoxy, but your costs will be higher. You could use a tandem two-seater, but not only could you not sit next to each other, but it'd mean giving up most of your storage space. You could make the passengers lean back further to reduce frontal area, but that will reduce cargo area and make the passengers less comfortable -- same with making the body narrower. You could have suppliers make ultralight versions of all of the "comfort" hardware (and safety hardware) needed for a real car, but you better have a huge budget for all of that tooling. There are small tweaks here and there you could make to t
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
What we need are new roads for these cars. Essentially something along the lines of a glorified bike path.
At that point, these cars will essentially design themselves. They're so lightweight...I can imagine hundreds of different varieties will pop into existence.
These roads would be cheaper and easier to maintain, and require fewer traffic signals.
Now if someone would only come out with a decent version of SimCity, I could at least play with my fantasy.
Commie.
As long as you're competing with 200hp monsters on the main road, these ultralights will creep up to normal-ish weight.
But if all the cars on the road were ultralights, it's unlikely that you would need air bags, crumple zones, or whatever else is slowing you down.
A bike is basically the minimalist model of what you should be basing the design on. It carries 1 passenger (how often do you give someone a ride to work?), 20-30lbs of cargo (milk and bread, for example), does about 10mph (maybe more...I have a mountain bike), and has no shell or safety features. It costs practically nothing to maintain, meaning there's nothing stopping you from having 2 or 3 vehicles (of varying weights) for different purposes. The only downsides of a bike is that it's slowish, and you might have to shower afterward.
But as long as you don't crash into an SUV, that's good enough. The solution is to get the SUVs on the parkway where they belong.
>A top speed of 30mph...and it just went from cool to useless.
Hardly. I average 20-30mph to work each day. That's getting up to 60mph and then stopping at a light every couple of minutes. Considering I'm getting 1/2 to 1/3 the speed of my car, that's a pretty awful road network I have to use.
Ideally you would get this thing up to 30mph and then actually drive it for more than two minutes at a time.
...the Pres. Carter speed limit...
You mean this Pres. Carter? *sigh* Just goes to show... And guess who was president when it was repealed. I mean, not that these little trivialities really make a difference.
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Useful for what? Not all of us have to "haul gear" or traverse "goat trails." Some of us just need to get from point A to point B on flat, paved city streets. I bet there are lots of folks out there right now who walk or ride bicycles instead of owning cars who would love this thing.
. http://www.shell.com/home/content/ecomarathon/about/current_records/ [shell.com] http://www-static.shell.com/static/deu/downloads/aboutshell/media/news/shell_eco_marathon_press_kit_2009.pdf [shell.com]
a) The CalPoly is an IC Prototype (futuristic) entry; as some noted, the record is held by the Microjoule, St Joseph La Joliverie, 3,771km/l (8870mpg per wolfram Alpha) b) There are categories for Urban Course - realistic quasi street legal modifications, with significant economy wins by the Norwegian and danish teams (fuel cell and ic engine
Something I kept talking about years ago finally made it onto slashdot.
BUT YOU FOOLS ARE FOCUSING ON THE WRONG CAR.
Considering we've got THREE THOUSAND MPG a few years ago from another group - a bunch of HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS.
Try again, slashdot. Next time you rip off one of my leads, from YEARS AGO, at least focus on the prior cars that BEAT THE SHIT out of this current car.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And then they sent it to NTSHA crash testing.
Services for the crash test dummies will be held Friday. It will be closed casket.
Even if you get all of the SUVs off the road, there are still semis and buses.
Even if you get semis and buses off the road, there are still large, heavy inanimate objects (bridge supports, trees, culverts, etc).
Bikes are not a substitute for a car. Rain, snow, ice, cargo capacity, passenger capacity, safety, speed, etc as just a few examples. A non-shelled bike has as much drag as the much larger Aptera -- bike drag coefficients suck, and they only get by on having a small cross section. And non-ebikes are bad because they require the extremely environmentally costly energy conversion method, copious amounts of light + copious amounts of water + copious amounts of fertilizer + copious amounts of land -> small amount of food energy -> inefficiently converted to mechanical energy. Again, the only way that bikes aren't as bad for the environment as the horribly inefficient conversion would suggest is simply how small and light they are -- which comes at the downside of low speeds, no safety, tiny cargo capacity, single passenger, no protection from the elements, etc, etc.
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
They have accomplished in making a wonderfully efficient go-cart that has no hope of meeting crash tests, emission tests, nor lighting or other safety requirements. Once they add that 2,000lbs worth of equipment and the 60 or so hp it needs to make it to minimum speeds allowed on the interstate highways, they'll be down to 20-40mpg.
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You need airbags, crumple zones, etc for more than just hitting cars, if you run into a tree those measures are needed too.
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MPG only show you in a very abstract way HOW to save money. Going from 70 MPG to 80 MPG very obviously tell me for the same quantity of fuel I am getting further away. But if you have a fixed distance you travel in average per week (commuter) does it tell you how much you will spare with a simple glance ? No it does not. You either calculate your distance per week you travel and divide by the MPG to get the number of gallon, or you have to do exactly what the GP did or what we have in the EU for along time, you get the consumption for a FIX DISTANCE. Knowing that I am going from 16 liter per 100 to 4 liter per 100 km immediately shows me that NO MATTER the average distance I have per week, I will space 75% fuel. Knowing my fuel budget is then a simple matter to calculate how much I spare, without EVER knowing how many kilometers I *really* do.
In otehr word if my Fuel Budget is X euro(or dollar), and my new vehicule consumption for a FIX distance is -z% , then my fuel budget in the month will get -z% in average. On the other hand MPG figure are actually a tad misleading because of the inverse ratio as shown, the biggest number will tend to be grouped together. So going from 25 to 50 MPG (25 difference) is actually much MUCH better than going from 200 to 240 MPG (40 MPG difference). So for the consumer it is MUCH MUCH better toknow how many gallon per 100 miles (how many liter per 100 km) they will consume , rather than how many miles 1 gallon bring them.
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>>>And guess who was president when it was repealed. I mean, not that these little trivialities really make a difference.
You're right. They don't. It doesn't matter to me who passed the 55mph speed limit, because that was not the point of my post. But since your brought-up politics:
- Rep or Dem, they both have demonstrated themselves intent upon increasing government, and decreasing individual liberty, while completely ignoring the People's Constitution as if it did not exist. The fact you engage in such R v. D nonsense indicates you are still stuck in the sports mentality, rather than thinking logically & rationally about government. :-)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Guess you didn't get the gist of my reply, but yours is even funnier...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I'll be impressed when a 36-foot motorhome gets 50 MPG.
...do you think it's going to take the Petrol companies to shut this one up and keep it from the public? (On that same token, hydrogren? Where'd that go? Or Steam? Where'd that go? And why are we still "so far behind" in development of electric vehicles?)
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