“I want to create engineers who can do hands-on engineering work, not another computer geek sitting at a terminal all day,” said Promod Vohra, the dean of the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL.

Vohra is proud to say that he certainly achieved that goal with a group of NIU students who made up the Society of Automotive Engineers Supermileage team in a competition to create a vehicle that would prove to be highly efficient with its gas mileage.

How efficient? How does 1,265 miles per gallon sound?

That’s what the NIU team’s vehicle tested out at on the competition track in Marshall, Mich., on June 10-11, 2010, and it was good enough to rank No. 1 amongst competing teams from the United States.

It was the first time that NIU had fielded a team from its College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, and it left with something to shoot for – because it placed third in the global competition, which drew 30 teams from across North America and as far away as India and the United Arab Emirates.

Defending champion Universite’ Laval from Quebec, Canada, placed first in the global competition by creating an aerodynamic vehicle that posted a mileage of 2,340 per gallon on its last run on the track.

“We were going up against teams that had been around for awhile, so the odds were completely against us,” said NIU team member Charles Ruetsche of Palatine, IL.

In creating the vehicle “from the ground up,” team members found the most time-consuming challenge to be creating the carbon-fiber shell of the vehicle. Because the project was a senior design project for the students, it had to entail tools, formulas and software they had used in four years of study. But making the vehicle body mold, made of Styrofoam, was something they had not encountered in classroom studies.

The NIU team of five individuals built the vehicle on a budget of $7,000, compared to some other entrants that had teams of as many as 20 members and vehicles constructed on budgets up to $30,000.

The NIU team went with a Briggs and Stratton motor more common in a weed whacker than in an aerodynamic car.

Though it may not be practical to think that major car manufacturers and oil companies are going to embrace these types of vehicles in the immediate future, Vohra made it clear that the project has ramifications far beyond the fact that it has been proven that a small, one-man, aerodynamic vehicle could greatly reduce the country’s need for oil-based fossil fuels.

“We are teaching that engineering in the future means creating products that have appeal in a global market,” Vohra said. “While there are things in today’s economics that take jobs away from America, we see a future in which things are made in America that are sold and used worldwide.”

As for the potential for vehicles in the future that need very little fuel, Vohra said he did not think it would be a big issue with companies producing oil in the United States, but the Middle East may not like it if Americans were less dependent on their oil.