Georgia Tech EcoCAR Supporters,
It's hard to believe, but it's been over three years since we first started the EcoCAR Challenge here at Georgia Tech. Over 60 students and faculty have been a part of our team and we have had an amazing three years designing, re-engineering, and refining our next generation advanced technology hybrid vehicle. As the final year of competition comes to a close, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank everybody that made our participation in this challenge possible and to present some of our final results.
Over the past two weeks we have been in Milford, MI at GM's global proving grounds and in Washington, DC at the headquarters of the US Department of Energy. In Milford, we joined the other 15 universities in this competition and tested our vehicles in 12 different dynamic events over 7 days against each other and the stock production vehicle. These events represent the same tests that GM uses to judge their own vehicles and encompass evaluations of acceleration, braking, handling, drive quality, towing, fuel economy, pollutant emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, and petroleum use.
The powertrain architecture that Georgia Tech chose to use is called a power-split hybrid, and to accomplish this we chose to use a prototype GM hybrid transmission. The use of this prototype transmission represented the most ambitious architecture of any selected, and we are pleased to announce that of the six universities that chose to use this architecture, Georgia Tech placed first in competition. In addition, of the six new incoming universities that did not participate in the previous competition, Georgia Tech placed second. Overall, GT placed seventh out of the sixteen competing universities. In addition, we placed highly in several event categories:
- #4 in WTW GHG reductions
- #4 in 60-0 mph braking distance
- #5 in WTW petroleum consumption reduction
- #6 in pollutant tailpipe emissions
- #7 in fuel economy, including UF weighting for plug-in teams
- Best Vehicle Appearance
After competing our vehicles in Michigan, we all traveled to the DOE headquarters in DC for the second week of competition. There I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy, and was interviewed with him on live TV on Fox News (http://video.foxnews.com/v/994961802001/future-eco-car/). Having the DOE as a competition sponsor had other perks, as we were given a private tour of the White House and also had our closing finale ceremony in the Library of Congress.
We were also able to invite Dr. Wayne Clough to walk over from his office at the Smithsonian Institute to meet the team and testdrive our vehicle. He was very excited to meet the team and reconnect with GT, and on his test drive he actually got a little overly excited and drove through the barrier the DOE had set up so that he could take us on a tour of the city. He showed us his house, the bay, some of his favorite restaurants, and got back to the DOE just as they had mobilized their security force to come chase after us.
Even more important than performing well at competition, we have had many students on our team receive very attractive offers for full-time positions from GM and other competition sponsors. We have been given a unique opportunity to complement our classroom education with hands-on real-world experience, made lifelong connections and friends, and made ourselves much more desirable employees regardless of the field we each eventually enter.
We would like to thank the Schools of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as the College of Engineering, for supporting us from the beginning. We will have our EcoCAR at many campus events throughout the year for people to test out, and are more than willing to set up individual ride and drives for anyone interested.
Thank you again to everyone who has supported us over these exciting three years,
GT EcoCAR Team