Clean diesel technology powered the top three winning vehicles and 12 of 17 entries overall in an American national engineering competition known as ‘Challenge X’ to design the ‘green’ cars of the future, an achievement warmly welcomed by the Diesel Technology Forum, an industry lobby group supporting diesel vehicle manufacturers in the US market, which says that over the next 16 months, more than a dozen new clean diesel vehicles will be available to consumers."
Seventeen universities fielded engineering teams to design a car that runs on smaller amounts of fuel made from renewable resources. Each team reconfigured a Chevrolet Equinox sport utility vehicle using hybrid, plug-in or fuel cell technology and alternative fuels sources such as biodiesel, ethanol and hydrogen. Twelve of the teams used diesel as part of their technology solution.
General Motors, the U.S. Department of Energy and others sponsored the competition, whose winner was announced at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
