MSU's EcoCar Team is Speeding Along to Success

January 20, 2012

The Mississippi State University (MSU) EcoCar team has spent the past three years participating in EcoCar: The NeXt Challenge. Sponsored by General Motors (GM) and the U.S. Department of Energy, this three year competition began in 2009 and concluded this past June with a two week event in Detroit, Michigan.

A student-led competition focused on advanced vehicular design, EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge invited competitors to design and engineer an ecocar – a car with lower fuel consumption and emissions – while still maintaining utility, safety and performance.  After submitting a proposal for consideration to enter the competition, 16 teams from across the United States and Canada were selected to compete in the three year challenge.

The MSU EcoCar team finished in sixth-place overall, while finishing in first place in a number of categories, including student presentations.  Their faculty advisor, Professor Marshall Molen, was honored with the Outstanding Faculty Adviser Award, with judging based primarily on student recommendations.

For Doude, the awards came from outside the competition.  "While we still didn't finish where we would have liked to this year, we beat a lot of extremely competitive teams, and we accomplished our real goal: several of the students have graduated and have accepted job offers in extremely competitive positions in the automotive field," he said.  "We are slowly, but surely, populating the auto industry with graduates of MSU's EcoCar program."

As the MSU EcoCar team has already accepted an invitation  to compete in EcoCar2, which begins next year, we are sure to continue to see incredible talent infiltrating the auto industry from Mississippi State University. 

Read the article in Pointe Innovation magazine.

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