Mississippi State University’s EcoCar3, a four-year collegiate competition, gives engineering students the opportunity to have a hands on auto-making experience.
Jared Oakley, engineering manager for the project and graduate student at MSU, described the engineering team set up. 
“Under our engineering team, we have four different subteams,” Oakley said. “We have system modeling and simulation, controls, electrical and mechanical. All four of those subteams work together to progress the project to the same point. It’s my job to manage those and make sure everybody’s working at the same time.” 
Ashley Madison, junior, communication major, who serves as the team’s Communication Manager, said that there are currently 16 universities involved in the competition.
“Ultimately we’re trying to make a 2016 Camaro more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, but we also want it to have the same horsepower that you typically expect out of a Camaro,” Madison said, “All the teams are competing against one another to ultimately make this car the best car that we can make it.”
Madison said the team is broken down into two sections. One is a business side of the team and the other area is a very technical component.
“On the business side we have project management,” Madison said, “They handle development, fundraising and things like that. Then we have communications, we handle media relations, outreach and all of those sorts of things. Together all of those teams work together to actually do the hands on work and all the implementation and the components into the vehicle.”
Madison said the team travels to several different workshops over the course of the four year project. 
 
“We’re about to go to Austin, Texas, at the end of this month for our winter workshop, we went to Boston in the fall, and at the end of the year we’re going to Yuma, Arizona,” Madison said.
Madison said the vehicle will be shipped to Arizona and driven on GM’s proving ground. 
Madison said learning how to work with people in other majors and other fields of expertise is valuable. Madison said, “This is almost a real world setting. They model it after GM’s development process for their vehicles. These students get to come in here and dive into a real world setting that they can apply after college.”
Stephen Hayes, Project Manager and graduate student, said the competition is managed by Argon National Laboratory and that the headline sponsors are General Motors and U.S. Department of Energy. 
“Year one was this past year and it focuses all on design,” Hayes said, “We hear about the project, we have to choose what our architecture’s going to be, make sure everything fits in the car, and then run different tests on that to see what the expected performance is,” Hayes said.
Hayes said year two is all about integration. 
“This past semester we got all of our parts in and we had to test them all outside of the vehicle,” Hayes said. 
“Just a few weeks ago we finally got the vehicle,” Hayes said. “The next stage is to take everything out of the vehicle and put our different components in.” 
Hayes said year three will involve refining some of the parts that they have put in the car and year four will be all about consumer acceptability.
“We’re pretty excited about where the car’s going to go,” Hayes said, “We’re trying to improve fuel efficiency without sacrificing the performance that’s expected out of a Camaro.”
For further information regarding EcoCar3 contact Ashley Madison at 205-317-4291 or via e- mail at [email protected] .