EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge is a new competition from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), General Motors (GM), Natural Resources Canada and other sponsoring organizations in which university teams will re-engineer a production GM vehicle to meet the requirements for earning Zero Emissions Vehicle credits from the California Air Resources Board. This competition will be managed by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and is a successor event to Challenge X: Crossover to Sustainable Mobility, a three-year university competition ending in May 2008 that focused on re-engineering a Chevrolet Equinox to minimize its fuel consumption and emissions.
EcoCAR is open to all accredited engineering schools in North America and DOE and GM expect to select 16 teams for the competition in April, 2008. Each team will receive a GM production vehicle, $10,000 in seed money, a wide range of powertrain components, and technical and mentoring support from the competition sponsors. Responses to the EcoCAR RFP are due by March 3rd, 2008.
"This is one competition where everyone is a winner," said Ed Wall, manager of the Vehicle Technologies Program, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. "EcoCAR demonstrates how government, industry and academia are working together to develop creative approaches and solutions to decreasing total emissions and energy consumption in some of America’s most popular vehicles."
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