Amateur Aerodynamics

Another semester is over and once again, I can’t stop thinking about systems design. Specifically, as I did last semester , I find myself gathering data and trying to apply analysis techniques from aerospace systems design to try and learn something about the physical limits of fuel efficiency in cars.   This time, I started with the EPA’s current list of battery electric (BEV), plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and hybrid cars (HEV)—a comprehensive accounting of fuel economy ratings for several hundred vehicles—to try and get an idea of what the current state of alternative-fuel cars looks like. You can find these at www.fueleconomy.gov . For this analysis, I limited data to MY2025 cars but these included all  2025 BEV, PHEV, and HEV with EPA ratings in the US today with a few exceptions (cars for which I was unable to find other information, such as the Ferrari SF90 and 296, which are plug-in hybrids but for which Ferrari does not publish data such as curb weight). I also excluded ...

This summer road trip season may be my last for a few years, since I will be enrolled in school again full-time starting Monday and plan to take summer classes next year. Knowing this, I decided to go on my longest trip ever: starting from my home in Illinois, I drove to Phoenix and stayed with family, then over to Pasadena, up the Central Valley to San Francisco, through the Redwood Parks to Tacoma (my hometown), then across Washington and Idaho to Bozeman where I have more family, and finally to the Black Hills of South Dakota and then home—more than 6,000 miles in all. Top: Sunset at Colonel Allensworth State Park, California. Above: The Coastal Redwood is absolutely incredible; these trees in northern California, the Giant Sequoia to the south, and the Dawn Redwood in China are the last remnants of the Cretaceous forest that once covered most of the globe, according to the placards at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Since I’m paying tuition now and need to be frugal, road tripping ef...

It’s that time of year again: opening weekend at Watkins Glen, which means last Friday nearly 40 people took to the track to drive (slowly) around it in the annual Green Grand Prix. Although, not as slowly as you might think. If you do it right, you won’t touch your brakes; my traction control was cutting in on the back sweeper on the Boot and Turn 1. I’ve been making the trip out to New York from Illinois for a few years now, and I always find myself thinking about the efficiency of my car not just during the competition but also during the long drive (I removed the stereo several years ago, so I have a lot of time to think!). This year I had also read something thought-provoking in Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland , a book about the discovery of quantum mechanics: “Abandoning assumptions that seem self-evident can lead to greater understanding.” What assumptions have I made about energy efficiency that might be holding me back? Well, the only way to answer that is to abandon everything an...