Contact: Robbie Ward
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Matthew Doude walks around the mid-sized sports utility vehicle in the Mississippi State University "showroom," pointing out the electric motor under the back cargo area and the dash-mounted personal computer.
The McCool resident casually points out that it averages 38 miles-per-gallon and runs on B20 biodiesel or standard diesel fuel.
Clad in blue jeans and T-shirt, Doude then sits in the driver's seat and demonstrates how to use the wireless Internet and MP3 player on the built-in hard drive of the front display. He points to the dashboard display of the vehicle's battery charge and average fuel economy.
Standing beside the white vehicle striped in maroon along the bottom, Doude sounds like a car salesman working on a commission. He isn't.
Instead, the casually dressed young man is a mechanical engineering graduate student, and his showroom is a high-technology laboratory at MSU's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems.
Known usually by the acronym CAVS, the laboratory was created several years ago to develop vehicle designs that utilize next-generation materials and concepts.
Over the past year, Doude has shown many people around the Challenge X vehicle he and other MSU students redesigned. They were winners of a three-year competition sponsored by General Motors that attracted entries from 17 institutions of higher learning--all working to convert a standard 2005 Chevrolet Equinox crossover SUV into a hybrid gas-saving vehicle.
The competition challenged students from the United States and Canada to apply their knowledge of mechanics, electricity, fuel efficiency and other design factors to transform the vehicle of today into a vehicle of the future.
In recent months, Doude, the MSU Challenge X team leader, has demonstrated the vehicle's abilities to everyone from a fourth-grade class to U.S. senators to talk show host Jay Leno.
In addition to national notoriety, the MSU team received $31,500 in prize money, including $15,000 from the National Science Foundation for Marshall Molen, the team adviser who holds the rank of distinguished professor in the Bagley College of Engineering.
Next week [May 12-22], 15 team members will take their creation on a final spin as required by the competition rules. Traveling from East Brunswick, N.J., to Washington, D.C., they will participate in a Challenge X Road Race with the goal of raising additional public awareness of the technologies and concepts used in redesigning the vehicle.
Clearly, the MSU students, General Motors designers and representatives of the U.S. Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory--also a competition sponsor--understand the need to develop better vehicle technologies. They are joined these days by most in the general public as gasoline prices rise daily toward what many experts predict will reach $4-$10 a gallon in the near future.
"Hybrids are the stepping stone to transition to a different type of energy," Doude said.
Fellow team member Matt Young, an electrical engineering graduate from Meridian, said the more he and others take the vehicle out in public, the more drivers like what they see. "It gets people out of the mindset that a hybrid vehicle needs to be a small vehicle that nobody likes," Young observed. "This is something people want."
While the experience has provided the Challenge X team with a fun way to learn about developing technologies, it has the additional benefit of helping them find jobs after graduating. Eight already have job offers in the automobile industry and others are expected to join them.
Before they graduate, Challenge X team members will continue designing new ways to improve what one day they'll drive out of an actual dealer showroom. They hope to participate in GM's follow-up competition to Challenge X--called EcoCAR.
"We already submitted our application," Doude said.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For more about the MSU Challenge X project, contact Amanda McAlpin at 662-312-8672 or visit www.msuchallengex.org.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.