Video: MSU Students Making 2016 Camaro More Efficient

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STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI) — MSU students are taking on a new challenge, hoping to drive away the winner in a car rebuild competition.

EcoCar 3 is a 4 year competition sponsored by GM and the Department of Energy, where 15 teams of college students across the country try to make a car more fuel efficient, while keeping up it’s performance standards.

They may look like mechanics but they are all college students, working to improve the future of the car industry by coming up with creative ways to improve them.

This team is planning to put a fiberoptics network in a 2016 Chevy Camaro, which should improve many functions.

” Decrease the cars weight, remove electrical interference, improve user feedback, so you’ll know if your taillight goes out, as well as improve cyber security, ” says team member Charles Boyd.

The students are hoping to build on the success of cars like this one, which gets up to 118 miles per gallon.

The student team has a reputation of success, winning the competition 4 times so far.

Their secret ingredient is team work.

” Build a connection between the department of communication and engineering students to kind of help those engineers translate all the technical terms and the work they do to the public, ” says team member Casey Mcgee.

” In undergrad, you always work with students in your major, this is a project where we have students in just about any major you can think of, which is how it’s gonna be in the industry, ” says team member Stephen Hayes.

An industry that many of the team members have developed a passion for and hope to get jobs in after graduation.

” They have the opportunity to come up with the ideas and implement them and it just really sets them apart when they get out into the industry, ” says Mcgee.

Even though the more than 100 member team is all volunteers , they say the experience is more than they could ever get in the classroom, building a foundation that will drive them down a road of success.

The team will compete in the first round of competition next month, they will get their Camaro to work on in December.