SAE Supermileage

I recently returned from six fun weeks at Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps so needless to say I've been a little behind on the updates. Here is an article published by our public relations department talking about our 2nd place finish at SAE Supermileage.

Wes Muntz

June 29, 2007

Cedarville, Ohio — With gas prices on the rise, the pressure to find alternative fuels and improve fuel economy just keeps increasing. To encourage creative research on these issues, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) held its 28th Annual SAE International Supermileage® competition June 7-8 to see which engineering students could come up with the best “supermileage” on their self-designed and self-built vehicles.

Ready for the challenge, 10 Cedarville engineering students and their advisor, Dr. Larry Zavodney, designed and built two sleek cars, made to run frugally on regular automotive gasoline.

At the Eaton Corporation Marshall Proving Grounds in Marshall, Mich., Cedarville’s Gold Lightning II took second place with 1,240 miles per gallon. To put this into perspective, the car could have driven to California on less than two gallons of gas.

The competition included 32 schools from the U.S., Canada, India, and Bahrain. Schools such as Rose-Hulman (1,541 mpg), UCLA (832 mpg), and the University of Dayton (188 mpg) competed.

There and back again.

So the Eco-Marathon has come and gone and Cedarville had their best showing of cars ever. We were able to break and re-break the the school record a few times on Saturday. I must say our cars were the stars of the show with many onlookers and only a few jealous critizers. Overall Cedarville put the most runs on the board and GL2 never broke down once. We calculated that we drove GL2 alone for over 100 miles in the matter of a few days without a single problem. Talk about reliability. In case you are looking for stats, GL2 took 4th with 1135.3 mpg, GL1 got 7th with 897.9 mpg and "Slipstream" took 9th with 732.8 mpg and only one complete run.

Wes

Vegas Baby!

Our team has finally left the shop for the first time in months and we have hit the road. Right now we are staying in Las Vegas at Alan's house. As far as working goes we are just doing some wet sanding and buffing on the bodies to make em look pretty. Last night we were able to head out to the strip and check out the sights and shows. We went to the Exotic Car shop and the first thing we did was check the orange peel in the paint jobs. Supermileage has thoroughly messed us up. We can't even enjoy looking at freaking sweet cars anymore without being critical. As a random fact last night I dreamed about the Eco-Marathon. That's when you know you are obsessed...
Later,

Wes

So close, but so far away...

Here are some recent pictures. We had some test runs in Lowe's parking lot and things went very well. It was freezing cold out, but only the petcock on the fuel bottle broke so we were pretty happy.

Burning the Midnight Oil

It's 3:00 a.m. and almost everyone on our team is here in the shop. So far it's looking like it will be our second all-nighter in a row. We are trying to get GL1 ready to strap down in the trailer for our test runs at Kil-Kare Race Track in the morning. Dustin is almost done with his exhaust pipes and Nate is trying desperately to fix GL1's computer. Dr. Z just put on the clear coat for the front and rear body panels. FYI, we are leaving for California in less than 27 hours. Booyah. I am tired.

-Wes