Media Credit: Chris Kominczak Forrest Jehlik, Lead Technical Coordinator for the Challenger X competition, Dave Parker from General Motors, and Louie Moret from Sensors inc, prepare a control vehicle for the upcoming contest.

This weekend UT students will join others from across the country and compete to create the most energy-efficient vehicle at the Challenge X Winter Workshop.

The workshop is a nationwide program sponsored by General Motors, the U.S. Department of Energy and Sensors Inc. that gives 17 university teams the opportunity to develop their own vehicle. The main objective of the challenge, as stated on their Web site, is to re-engineer a GM Equinox to make it minimize energy consumption, emissions and greenhouse gases while maintaining or exceeding the vehicle's utility and performance abilities.

The three-year program culminates each summer in June when teams compete in several different events with the vehicles they've designed. The Winter Workshop is one of several workshops in which important issues and problems are addressed, and teams can obtain on-road emissions data using the same instrumentation that will be used at competition in June.

"This is the best and most direct way for all of us to get our hands dirty in the auto industry and make some very good contacts," said Nicole Munguia, mechanical engineering senior and outreach leader of UT's Challenge X team.

According to Jenny Rios, marketing director for Challenge X, 30 students have already received jobs at GM through the program.

All sides benefit from the Challenge X competition. Students get valuable real-world experience and cutting edge training while the motor companies get access to the best and brightest students from around the country that could potentially work for them, Rios said.

This marks the final year of the program that started in 2005. Last year, the UT team ran into wiring problems with their vehicle and had to drop out of several events.

"I guess you could consider us the underdog, but we're going to make a big recovery from last year's competition," Munguia said.

Munguia and the UT Challenge X team believe they have a unique strategy that will set them far apart from the competition. UT is the only team that is significantly modifying the engine. They are also daringly using unleaded gasoline in a diesel engine.

"Every other team is concentrating on improving their fuels, such as experimenting with fuel cells and things of that nature," Munguia said. "We, on the other hand, believe we're taking a far more realistic, yet still innovative approach that can be used sometime in the near future."

Munguia cites the current astronomical costs of fuel cells as one of the reasons for their impractical usage in the near future.

"We don't want to reinvent the wheel, we just want to make the wheel work better."

The Winter Workshop will be held Friday at 9:15 a.m. at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in the Commons Building at 10100 Burnet Road.

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