Backstory: Breaking the gas ceiling

Ask Jerrod Bouchard what he did on his summer vacation and he'll let you peek at the car he helped create, a teardrop-shaped three-wheeler that gets 600 miles to the gallon – if you pedal. But if you're feeling lazy, this human/solar-powered hybrid, which plugs in at home and pops out solar panels while parked, will zip off at 50 m.p.h. for 50 miles. No pedaling required.

Of course, miles per gallon in this case is only an energy equivalent. The "fish," as Jerrod's team of nine fellow students dubbed the bullet-proof vehicle, doesn't burn gasoline – just a little electricity and some calories. No need for a traditional fill-up. Ever.

And that's just the point at the first student-led "vehicle design summit" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): to build commuter cars more efficient than anything the world has ever seen. It's a sort of garage mechanic meets computer geek event – a rogue student summer camp for the best young vehicle-engineering minds in the world. Their goal: create four cars that carry people and luggage – and get 300-plus miles per gallon. And do it all in eight weeks.

It's the kind of outlandish goal that makes professional auto engineers smirk like schoolchildren. But here on the banks of the Charles River, in storied MIT aeronautical labs that gave birth to jet turbines and spacecraft, the next generation of automobiles is gestating in the minds of 53 high-octane intellects – engineering students from 21 universities in 15 nations.

"People say we're going to have green vehicles in 20 years. Well, we can have them now," says Robyn Allen, the MIT student who conceived of the vehicle design summit. "What we're trying to do is show the direction the big automakers should be moving."

Robyn popped out of her dorm room this spring with a vision so audacious that perhaps only a college student would try it: revolutionize the global auto industry – over summer break. Within hours, she confided her idea to fellow student Anna Jaffe. By the next morning, the pair had sketched out a plan and put out an e-mail to the smartest pocket-protector set they knew – students around the world who build solar cars for an annual race across Australia.

Many of them, the women knew, were frustrated by the "Solar Challenge." It was yielding a standard tortilla-flat car that would never be practical in the real world. Now Robyn and Anna wanted to unleash the pent-up creativity of the college virtuosos to challenge Detroit.

The student teams decided to shoot for five cars that got 500 miles per gallon. But reality soon set in. Four cars at 300 miles per gallon – one fuel-cell powered, a human-powered/electric hybrid, an all-electric, and a biodiesel burner – seemed more pragmatic.

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Control central for this student "Manhattan Project" is office 33-218c at MIT, a room the size of two large broom closets. It is adorned with cartons of respirators, white disposable bunny suits, a shelf of donated computer modeling books nobody has time to read, and cases of donated SpaghettiOs – the sustenance, apparently, of any serious engineering student.

Receipts and Post-it notes mosaic the walls. In the center of it all, Robyn sits serenely behind her laptop, queen of the organized chaos that is building as an impending deadline approaches.

It is 10:35 a.m. on a Thursday in July, another in a stream of 16-hour days for Robyn and the four teams. Today she is simultaneously making phone calls to track down parts, taking questions from team leaders, firing off e-mails, and munching Tostitos.

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