Louisiana Tech students saw success—including praise from Jay Leno—in Detroit last weekend as its Eco-Car team placed second in the UrbanConcept diesel category and broke barriers with a compressed natural gas-powered vehicle at the Shell Eco-marathon Americas event.
“We were pleased with (the second place result),” associate professor Heath Tims tells The News-Star. “We’re always looking to push the limits on everything.”
Tech set the record for the UrbanConcept/diesel category several years ago when its car performed at 488 miles per gallon.
The Shell Eco-marathon is a competition where students design and build cars with the focus of challenging industry standards on energy efficiency. The team also competed in the compressed natural gas category.
“We were the first car to run compressed natural gas that was able to get through technical inspection and get out on the course and actually run,” Tims says. “We didn’t get a full run but that was definitely groundbreaking.”
Tims says the team ran into issues because the vehicle and the tank that was provided to them did not have enough fuel.
“That’s just how it goes sometimes when you have a new category like that. Even Shell did not know what to expect. We’ve now kind of set the standard for what that’s going to be,” he says.
Tims said no other car had ever made it through the inspection phase and was able to get on the road.
“For us in this region, with the additional natural gas activity, that was a big reason why we wanted to compete in that category,” Tims said. “Our sponsor, CenterPoint Energy, was definitely interested in competing in that category as well.”
Former Tonight Show host and car collector Leno complimented Tech’s natural gas car and spoke with the students.
“Jay Leno not only personally told us that our vehicle was the best-looking vehicle there, and in his words, ‘production ready,’ but he also spoke at the final awards ceremony and called out the Tech car—how beautiful it was,” he says.
While addressing the crowd during the awards ceremony, Leno said of the Tech team’s car: “That looked like something (Formula One race car designer) Gordon Murray would have put out. I was real impressed with that.”
