THIS CAR TRAVELS 75 MILES ON A SINGLE GALLON OF GASOLINE!

Enlarge Image Image Gallery UPPER RIGHT: Instructor Ernie Parker whizzes on down the road in his advanced engineering class's 75-mpg automobile ... sans steamlined body. ABOVE: Two views of the stationary vehicle ... and the car with its clothes on. The guts of the hydraulic drive train and energy storage system ... Parker adjusts the 16-hp engine ... and a 3/4 rear view of the street-ready auto.

IT seems that Portland, Oregon's Vincent Carman (see "Can This Transmission Really Double Your Car's Mileage?" in MOTHER NO. 48) isn't alone. At least one other group of inspired experimenters has found a way to use hydraulics to vastly increase an automobile's gas mileage.

That group is a class of advanced students at Minneapolis, Minnesota's Hennepin Vocational Technical Center. And under the guidance of instructor Ernie Parker (and without ever having heard of Vince or his Inertial Storage Transmission), the class recently designed and built what they call a "hydraulic storage transmission".

Does it work? It sure does! As the students have already demonstrated, when their special drive train is coupled to a 16-hp Tecumseh engine, installed in a Volkswagen chassis, and covered with a Bradley GT body ... the resulting one-of-a-kind automobile will travel (at speeds up to 70 mph) an incredible 75 miles on a single gallon of gas.

That's impressive, especially when you remember that the HVTC fuel-stretcher was entirely constructed from off-the-shelf components that are readily available to any home mechanic in any part of the country. The sleek little automobile contains absolutely no exotic technology or hardware at all.

IT ALL BEGAN IN 1920

The HVTC class project was originally launched because of a 1920 magazine article brought in by student Tom Steincamp. The piece described an automobile with a hydraulic drive train and labeled the vehicle "the car of the future". Some library research and a few group discussions soon convinced the class that the idea was a good one ... but that it would be even better if an energy saving accumulator was added to the hydraulic system.

Before long Parker's crew had roughed out a preliminary design of the new hydraulic drive. And the concept looked so good on paper that the group simply decided to go ahead and build one to see how it would work.

THE FIRST PROTOTYPE WAS A DUD

Parker's students quickly scrounged up a well-used VW chassis, a 60-hp VW engine, and enough hydraulic odds and ends to assemble a crude prototype of their design. It was a disappointment. The vehicle ran well enough, but it consumed only slightly less gasoline than a stock Volkswagen.