Here Comes the 100-mpg Car

(Page 3 of 6)

August/September 2008
By Jack McCornack 
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A 100-mpg car that's also cool? Are you looney?

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All else being equal, small cars use less fuel than big cars. But small cars aren’t cool ... or are they? Thanks to the Corvette, the Viper and similar exotic sports cars from Europe — both modern and classic — sports cars are cool, even though they’re small. Thanks to our culture’s driving habits, two seats are plenty for the vast majority of our driving. Thanks to the limited engine power available 50 years ago, sports cars then had a minimum of frills, and sports racing cars were as streamlined as the rules allowed. And thanks to the power of nostalgia and the skyrocketing value of classic cars, there are few things cooler than a 50-year-old sports racer.

All of this comes together to form our styling target for MAX. It will look homemade enough for rat rod credibility, with a chassis and body that would have looked at home on the Sports Car Club of America grid at Laguna Seca Raceway, circa 1961. It shouldn’t have much aerodynamic drag and our weight goal is 1,250 pounds, so it won’t need much of an engine to pull it around. We’re hoping for tolerable performance with 30-some horsepower.

Yes, you read that right, tolerable performance. With about half the horsepower of a Geo Metro and about half the weight, MAX should accelerate about like a Metro, which is tolerable. There were plenty of sports cars in the ’50s that never had it so good. If you want high performance with your high efficiency, spend about $110,000 and get the all-electric Tesla Roadster. Now then, where were we?

What makes MAX go?

We’ve chosen an unconventional engine to give us that “tolerable performance,” a turbocharged 1100cc Kubota diesel. It’s an industrial engine, closely related to a small tractor engine. Kubota is a Japanese manufacturer of diesel power equipment. City folks may not be familiar with the company, but anybody with a farm knows who they are — more than one traditional farmer has a “mule” named Kubota.

The company does not make diesel engines for cars, but their engines are well-respected for agricultural equipment and electrical generators, and they meet the air-quality regulations for those industries.

We think we can meet the Auto X Prize exhaust emissions standards with this engine, but we really chose it for its extreme fuel-efficiency.

Could I really build one myself?

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