Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:
The car has an air-cooled engine with molten sized recumbent rear and two front wheels weighing 600 gms each, leader of the eight-member team, Nishant Sarawgi said in Guwahati on Monday.
[…] The 55 kg single-person car is ten feet long, 2.5 feet wide and high and has to be driven in a reclining position, he said, adding that Project Garuda was made at a cost of Rs 5.5 lakh [US$11,000].
The car — named “Garuda” after a large mythical bird monster — features three bicycle wheels and a tweaked 97cc Honda engine, runs on both gas and kerosene, can hit 60 km/hour (37 miles/hour), and requires the driver to lie on his back. While it clearly isn’t ready for the mass automobile market, it does push the limits of what we think gasoline engines can do, and will push them even further if the students succeed in their attempt to improve its mileage to a staggering 500km per litre, or about 1,176 miles to the gallon! That’s the distance from New York to Tampa, or London to Rome, on a single gallon of gas.
Image via Rediff News.
3 responses so far ↓
1 B // Oct 20, 2008 at 10:32 pm
What kind of gas mileage does a train get?
2 mark // Oct 20, 2008 at 10:49 pm
I’m glad you asked that, because you got me curious enough to find this:
According to Oilcrisis, whatever it’s worth, “a two ton car would have to get 375 miles per gallon to equal the energy efficiency of a train.” This car gets even more than that, though it weighs much less than two tons.
3 B // Oct 21, 2008 at 10:43 am
Okay. So train is still my preferred method of travel. PLUS you can lay down too! And the cost is much lower.
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