Mississippi State’s EcoCar team was recently awarded first and third place in a national competition among 17 other universities in Daytona Beach, Fla. The competition is a three-year design competition cosponsored by General Motors and the Department of Energy. The competition focuses on development, exploration and implementation of advanced vehicle technologies
Team leader and mechanical engineering graduate student Matthew Doude said the team is in the second year of the competition where they build a vehicle.
“In May, we will go to Yuma, Arizona, to compete vehicle over the other 16 universities,” Doude said.
The team was formed approximately in 2004 when the Challenge X competition started, Doude said. Since then, members have come and gone but the team is still carrying off from that.
“We have a team meeting once a week with about 50 students on our team,” he said. “On a daily basis, there are six to eight people every day that work on the car. People work on it about 16 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Doude said their vehicle is a plug-in hybrid, meaning that it literally plugs into the wall and charges by electricity.
“The vehicle has a 40-mile all-electric range,” Doude said. “Then a diesel engine turns on and powers the vehicle from then on. The 40-mile range is important because 77 percent of Americans drive about 40 miles a day. This means they would never have to use any gas.”
Team webmaster and senior business information systems major Matt Williams said the MSU EcoCar team won first place in the winter workshop in Daytona Beach and took third place in the Hardware in the Loop Competition.
“This means Mississippi State University was the only team in the competition to place in both events,” Williams said.
As webmaster for the team, Williams handles the web presence of the MSU EcoCar team. He said he used WordPress, a blogging engine, to build the Web site. It allows for multiple team members to add updates easily without knowledge of wed development languages.
“This was important because I’ll be interning at a Web design firm this summer when the team is at our most important competition of the year in Yuma, Arizona,” Williams said. I needed the responsibility of maintaining the site to be passed on to someone else without having to recruit someone who specializes in hand-coding these type of sites, though we are always welcoming new people.”
Williams said he hand-coded two supplementary sites: the MSU EcoCar kids zone and the MSU EcoPrize page.
“The site was meant to integrate easily into social media sites like YouTube, Digg, Reddit, Twitter and Stumbleupon,” Williams said. “I also assist with the MSU EcoCAR twitter account with some other team members. We look for green articles and post them, provide blog updates and RT threads from national and other EcoCAR teams.”
Outreach coordinator and business administration graduate student Elizabeth Butler said all majors are welcome to join the EcoCar team.
“This is my first year, and I got involved because they needed an MBA to be a graduate assistant to handle the outreach section of the competition,” Butler said. “Outreach is really neat because it gives non-engineering majors a chance to gain experience in areas related to our major. For example, we have an education major who has coordinated some events with local schools to educate kids on hybrids.”
The EcoCar team welcomes all majors to come out to the Center for Advanced Vehicular System on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. Williams said the team takes new members all year long and are just looking for people eager to work.