An energy-efficient urban concept car designed and built by 14 Mendota Heights high school students will soon head to London for a global contest after winning a recent national competition.
St. Thomas Academy’s Experimental Vehicle Team won in the UrbanConcept category for electric-battery vehicles. It also also won the Shell EcoMarathon’s design award while qualifying to attend the international competition this July.
A three-day national competition took place this past weekend in Detroit and focused on energy efficiency. After a day of rigorous inspection, students drove six miles on a course made of blocked-off city streets, pausing three times to mimic city driving. Afterward, judges measured which team’s car used the least energy.
St. Thomas’s lithium-battery-powered car ran as efficiently as 52.7 miles per kilowatt hour, or about 1,750 miles per gallon, during the competition, instructor Caroline Little said.
“The entire time their car was running, the boys were doing the math and telling the driver when to brake and when to accelerate to conserve energy,” she said. “It was really fascinating to see.”
Together, the team has invested thousands of hours developing their car. It has seats, storage space, can run in rainy weather, and was made without commercially available body parts.
The Mendota Heights team beat college students from Duke University in North Carolina, Wright State University in Ohio, and Rice University in Texas, as well as other high school entries.
Another Minnesota high school left Detroit a winner too. Alden-Conger High School, located a few miles west of Albert Lea, Minn., won the UrbanConcept category for vehicles running on diesel fuel.
The St. Thomas Academy team plans to drive its car more before heading to London in hopes of improving its performance, and may consider re-gearing it to go more quickly. Currently, it only drives at 15 to 20 miles per hour. ‘Faster’ means it will take more energy to start the car and complete the course, however, Little said.
“We’re going to have to work out some bugs to figure out what’s the best way to get the most out of it in London,” she said. The Shell Eco-marathon Drivers’ World Championship for UrbanConcept vehicles will be held on July 3.