UBC Supermileage Team Makes TIME Magazine!
That’s right! Our 2006 entry to the annual SAE Supermileage competition in Michigan has made it into the TIME Best Inventions 2006. From TIME:
Here’s a secret: you don’t really need funky alternative fuels or an electric motor to trim your energy consumption on the road. Sometimes all it takes is a little ingenuity. A team of Canadian engineering students won the annual Supermileage race in Michigan with its 80-lb. carbon-fiber Mark V, which can travel 3,145 miles on a single gallon of gas. That’s thanks to details like a curved underbody, an ultra-fuel-efficient 54-cc engine and a driver who understands why the turtle beat the hare. The catch? You have to drive lying down, and the windows don’t open.
Read more at: http://www.time.com/time/2006/techguide/bestinventions/inventions/transportation5.html. Congratulations to the team, and we wish to thank the faculty at UBC and all of our sponsors who made this possible.
Congrats. It’s really a great achievement in terms of energy saving and design.
I like how far it can go on so little gas! How much does it cost to build one? I am 8 years old and in 2nd grade. I like science and I like cars so I definitely like your car! How do you drive the car? Because if you are lying down, how can you see? I also like how fast it can go and how it looks! How long did it take you to design it? Please email me back!
Dawson Gooch
How much is this going to cost??? I really want one, im in college and have a few more years until i graduate, i would def want one when i get a job. I don’t understand why its taking so long to get great inventions like this out to the world??????!!!!!!!! I would def invenst and reserve mine if i could.
Woah, read about that on time.com. How do you manage on seeing where you’re going? Mirrors or something? You could make a fortune if you managed to put that technology into a real car, $3 to go 3,000 miles! Great job!
I first loaded your site as http://supermileage.ca and none of the graphics loaded. When I went to http://www.supermileage.ca, all the graphics loaded.
I have been looking for a vehicle with low cost that I can use for commuting and basic transportation for two adults with enough cargo room to carry two laptops. This includes an enclosed canopy/cockpit, and I’m willing to give up the power and space of current conventional vehicles. How do I get my hands on this vehicle, or plans so I can adapt one of my own? I doubt that I’ll have access to all the high-tech components, but if you have a low-tech version I’d be very pleased to see it.
Thanks!
Nice car an all, but when are you going to put it on the market it looks cool
please reply
hey its me again just wondering how fast it goes
It cannot go ‘fast’…….there is an immutable law in physics that more or less states that if conditions remain the same, doubling the speed, quadruples the resistance (and it’s this resistance the energy, in the fuel, has to overcome).
This is the reason that the freight shipping line, ‘Hapag Lloyd’, is running it’s ships 3knots slower now that oil is so expensive.
It also explains why super sonic transport aircraft are not economic and have been abandoned as a viable concept.
By the way I have nothing to do with the team…..I’m just an interested ‘on looker’…… the machine must have rock hard tires to reduce rolling resistance and a minimal frontal area…..Actually I reckon it would have less resistance if operatedin reverse!! Birds gliding, for example are conserving energy, are small and narrow at the front with the larger body behind tapering off to a flat tail.
hi everybody
thanks for the nice words and interest! its people like you keep the discussions going and push for conservation. Its normally not my place to comment for a team i’m no longer part of, but its been a while and i think you guys deserve some sort of reply.
Mr. Dawson Gooch:
Question #1: How much does it cost?
This car cost us about $15,000 for all the parts and materials, but we spent a lot time on the car itself, which if we were to ever sell the car (which we are not going to do) we would have to include.
The body had to be designed, prototype models made (we made three different designs and a model of the old body for comparison), and wind tunnel tested. Once we figured out which one was the most efficient, we had to build the mould for the body, which we would lay the carbon fibre into. It took a lot of manual labour (mostly because we didn’t have any fancy machines to do the work for us).
For the chassis (the structure of the car) we used a honeycomb sandwich and had to design jigs to set up all the chassis/wheel components so that we could make sure that all of the wheels were very much aligned so they would be rolling as efficient as possible.
The engine was modified from an engine the competition gave us, but we spent a lot of time testing the engine. Because we used electronic fuel injection, we had to set up tables in the engine computer so that it would know how much fuel to put in depending on how fast the engine was turning and how much air we were giving it (controlled by the throttle). Then once we set up these tables, we could tune them so that we could get away with using the last amount of fuel while still being reliable.
So as you can see, a lot of time was put into the car to make it work, but it was all worth it! Putting that much time into something and just to see it run on the road made it all worthwhile.
Question #2: How do you see out of it?
we have windows in front, and on the sides with mirrors so that the driver can (sort of) see behind him. But because we had such a slanted front end and the driver was lying on his back, he had to prop up his head so that he could look through the front window. It was not comfortable and definately the view out is not as good as a road car.
Question #3: how long did it take to design it?
The 2006 car itself was not just from a year’s work, but it was taken from experience that we had building previous cars. Since the team officially started in 2001, you can count in 5 years’ work, with on average 6 contributing team members.
I don’t know the exact number of hours i put in, but i would estimate probably 1000 hours a year, so if you work that out it becomes:
1000 hours/person x 6 people x 5 years = 30,000 hours.
Ashley:
unfortunately, this car is not for sale. Its not meant for the real world, and is missing a lot safety features that you would need to make it road legal. If you are looking for a fuel efficient car, i suggest you look for one that is small and light as we went by the same concept to build our car.
Auto manufacturers are feeling more of a push to lower their emissions and produce more fuel efficient cars than ever. Progress takes time, so we can not expect a change overnight. Also, a lot of people are not ready for a drastic solution – it almost has to be evolved into such. Stay tuned – change is coming.
Duncan:
sorry about the graphics not being loaded properly the first time over.
As for your request for such a vehicle, i’m afraid that currently there isn’t such a thing that is road legal and relatively safe. I know that VW has been working on a 1L car which is sort of a more consumer-friendly version of our car but theres no word on when exactly it is coming out. There has been a lot of talk about it coming out, and then plans to axe it, and then to come out, etc. so unfortunately i have no real answer for you. If you would like, check out this link:
http://www.seriouswheels.com/cars/top-vw-1-liter-car.htm
Ethan:
sorry, this car is not road worthy – its merely to show what we can do, or an engineering exercise. The top speed with the current gearing is around 50km/h, depending on wind, and the incline its facing. =)
Alistair:
this is a question that we have posed ourselves, but obviously our car is not a bird. I do not fully understand what happens with birds and why they are shaped the way they are, but to theorize the tail is tapered, just in the same way ours is but in a vertical direction.
When we were wind tunnel testing the prototypes, we tried the car in a reverse direction and it was not nearly as efficient as when it was going forwards (0.18Cd vs. 0.11 forwards).
Hope that answers your questions! And thanks again for the interest.
Jonathan