Vehicle design summit

The Vehicle Design Summit is an initiative to develop an international design team capable of solving global problems in the public domain.

Phase 1 (VDS 1.0)
To jump-start this effort, VDS 1 took place between June 13 and August 13, 2006 at MIT when a group of 55 student engineers from all around the world came together to develop a fleet of SUPER-efficient vehicles. During the eight-week period, four vehicles designed and built around a set of four propulsion technologies; hydrogen, biofuel, human-power, and electricity. Each core technology was selected to enable discussion AbOUT a more general topic, specifically polyculture, grid vs. distributed energy generation, biological hydrogen production, and transportation in developing countries.1

Phase 2 (VDS 2.0)
The mission statement of the current phase 2 of the project states that it "will design, build and bring to market the VDS Vision 200, a hyper-efficient 4-6 passenger vehicle." They plan to have a limited production and field tests by August 2008 with a goal to market it in India by the end of 2009.2

Links

Summary of Phase 1 (VDS 1.0) http://vehicledesignsummit.org/website/content/blogcategory/18/40/

Recognition of project, August, 2006 http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/08/mit_vehicle_des.html

Website for Phase 2 (VDS 2.0) http://www.vehicledesignsummit.org (VDS 2.0)

Website of Belgium Team with summary of activities http://www.vehicledesignsummit.be (VDS 2.0 GROUP T Team)