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PROVO — A team of about 20 students at Brigham Young University now has the distinction of having designed and built the highest miles per gallon vehicle in the Western Hemisphere. The supermileage team, made up of mechanical engineering students, competed in the Shell Eco Marathon last month, taking first place at the competition. The team's vehicle is rated at 2,145 mpg, roughly the distance from Provo to New York City. The average is calculated from a ten-mile run around the track at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Josh Klingensmith, a sophomore, said to reach that high bar of efficiency, they started by omitting all unnecessary parts from the vehicle's build. "We got rid of all the creature comforts. There's no AC, you don't have 12-inch sub(woofers) in the car," Klingensmith explained. "Right now, I think it's 108 pounds total." The team achieved the lightweight with the help of a carbon fiber body, a slim, aerodynamic design, and very small components. The fuel tank consists of a 30-mililiter container, filled with ethanol. [gallery ids="908456,908455,908454"] "Ethanol has less energy in it per gallon, but it can run to a higher compression ratio," Dr. Dale Tree, who serves as the supermileage club's advisor, explained. While the vehicle is designed to go far, it is not meant to go fast, topping at around 23 miles per hour, which Tree said is targeted for optimum fuel efficiency. "We're trying to go far on a very small amount of fuel," Tree said. "If you drove your car so that you never used the brake, so that you were just rolling to a stop at every stop sign, every stoplight, you would get a much higher miles per gallon out of your car." That's where the driver's skill comes into play. They have to be able to fit into the very small driver compartment, with a maximum height of about 5'4" weighing no more than around 120 pounds. While all of these measures combined, may seem excessive, the idea is that ultimately the same principles could help engineer the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles. "The point is you take kind of a real world issue and we take it to the extreme," Klingensmith said. "The engineering problem solving is very similar." The supermileage team is now qualified to take their car to the global competition in Qatar, in 2027. "No one person builds a whole car," Tree said. "Not even the tire on the car or anything. It's a team of engineers that are gonna build each component of the car."
