EcoCar2 is a competition which challenges 15 US universities to “reduce the environmental impact of a Chevrolet Malibu without compromising performance, safety and consumer acceptability”, according to the official site.
The winners of the first year of the challenge is a interesting series-parallel plug-in hybrid, a project thought up by the Mississippi State University. According to the site, the first year of the competition will have the university students trying to make as many Eco modifications to the standard Chevy Malibu as they can, with emphasis "engineering design though modeling and simulation to select and virtually test their plug-in hybrid electric vehicle architecture."
The competition is sponsored by GM (hence the Chevy Malibu), the US Department of Energy and 25 other government organizations and corporations. This contest isn’t the first of its kind, having been preceded by a similar competition when, after the same 3-year development period, students at Virginia Tech managed to get a petrol-powered Chevy Equinox to use only 3.4l/100km (81.9 UK mpg), by turning it into a ‘range extender’ hybrid and running it on E85.
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