The Mississippi State University EcoCAR team started meeting for EcoCAR 2 — the sequel in EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge, a three-year vehicle technology engineering competition between MSU and 14 other universities.
The competition is a student-led, automotive design project co-sponsored by General Motors and the Department of Energy. The teams will focus on lowering fuel consumption and emissions, while maintaining the car’s utility, safety and performance. Marshall Molen, EcoCAR faculty advisor, said the competition benefits students by giving them hands-on experience in the engineering field.
“Students find that this helps them do something out of the classroom very practical. They have to design it with computer models, then they have to build it, then they have to measure how close it went to their predicted results; which is really what engineering is all about,” Molen said.
Last year capped off the EcoCAR competition, where MSU placed sixth overall at the end of the 3rd year. EcoCAR 2  started its own three-year process this fall, using GM-donated 2013 Chevrolet Malibus as the integration platform for MSU’s vehicle design. Matthew Doude, team leader, said although the EcoCAR team is starting on a new project, the goal remains the same.
“We hold ourselves to a pretty high standard. For us, really, the only acceptable goal is for us to win. That’s why we spend the hours and the work on the project that we do, with every year of the competition we expect to win first place,” Doude said.
This year’s team is composed of over 75 members coming from more than 13 different majors and are broken down into different subgroups. Doude emphasized year one work revolves around modeling and simulation.
“The entire first year of the competition is engineering and design. So we’ll be designing the vehicle over the next nine months,” Doude said. “Right now we are doing modeling and simulation, trying out different engines, different electric motors, different batteries to try to figure out a combination that we could possibly use.”
Josh Hoop, one of the group leaders, said laying a solid foundation during year one is crucial to the team’s performance in later years.
“The biggest challenge this year is we are stuck with the changes we make. The process that they want us to follow mimics the automotive industry. We have to stick with the decisions we make in the first year and pretty much every aspect of it is locked in where you can’t really go back and change your mind later on,” Hoop said.
In spring 2010, the EcoCAR team won the first place prize in the second phase of the competition, which involved building the EcoCAR prototype. Doude  said he feels the program’s recent accomplishments have raised the community’s expectations for the EcoCAR 2 team to perform.
“Our success in the last few years makes it kind of easy for us because we get good support from the university, a lot of name recognition around town, it’s easy for us to attract media attention,” Doude said. “But it does make it difficult because expectations are sky-high. It’s self-created, but the expectations are high on campus for us to finish at the top each year.”
Because each EcoCar project is a three-year endeavor, Hoop said he hopes the team can build off lessons from the last competition as well as train younger members.
“We definitely learned a lot of important lessons from the actual construction of the car but also in life and as a team, ourself. Not everything we learn is nuts and bolts but a lot of real world knowledge about a bunch of things, and team leaders are trying to pass that knowledge down to younger members,” Hoop said.