Thursday, 26 August 2010

Car built by high school students achieves 444 mpg

This story will challenge your beliefs about what high school students, especially

those who live below the poverty line and face alcohol and drug problems, are

capable of. Autopia, a blog at Wired.com, reported on the story of a class

project at the Automotive Design Studio at the DaLeSalle

Education Center which serves as an alternative high school. The project was to

design and build an electric car that weighed less than 1500 pounds,

half the weight of 98% of most electric vehicles today.
The car the students had to work with was a damaged 2000 Lola

Champ Car which was purchased for $2500 and repaired by students who had

collision repair courses. One of the eye-catching traits of the car is its

transparent body, which is made of a material by 3M which is the same that is used

to shrink wrap windows. The student’s attached the film to the bottom wire of

the body and then stretched it using a heat gun across the rest of a wire frame

in a process that takes an hour. To date, the skin has shown no fatigue or

damage after trial runs.



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