Eco-marathon Car Driving Pattern and Miles Per Gallon

Abstract

Annually, young students participate in the Shell Eco-marathon, a competition organised by Shell, in which teams are to present their design of cars that can drive extreme distances on 1 gallon of fuel. The first category in the competition is for the teams to design very aerodynamic cars and the second category is to design cars similar in body structure to the regular passenger car. Based on the allowed driving pattern and innovation of the teams in design of the vehicles and the engines, over 4,800 km/litre is the 2011 record compared with about 60 km/litre in the modern efficient regular cars. In this paper, we model the driving pattern around the Honda GX series engines for team using the internal combustion engine, a possible performance of 1,360 km/litre could be reached in the mixed mode driving using an engine whose brake specific fuel consumption is 23% lower and that can provide 33% more torque than the regular GX series.