General Motors Challenge X

By: Iver Penn

Three years ago General Motors has conducted a contest, Challenge X with the theme Crossover to Sustainable Mobility. The main objective of Challenge X is to encourage students to re-engineer a crossover sport utility vehicle that would minimize energy consumption, emissions, and lessen the hazardous greenhouse gases while being able to maintain or exceed the vehicle's utility and performance.

This extreme competition was participated by seventeen university teams. The Challenge X will provide future engineers an opportunity to partake in a hands-on research and development that utilizes cutting edge technologies. These futures engineers in order to achieve their goals of significantly reduce emissions while improving fuel economy has integrated advanced automotive technologies and alternative fuels such as hydrogen, ethanol, and biodiesel.

For the first two years of the competition participating teams have worked on simulation, development and testing while undergoing an extensive judging and evaluation throughout the process. General Motors is hoping that in the final year of the competition students together with their advisers will learned how to refine their vehicles to near-showroom levels especially in terms of performance, quality, and consumer acceptability. Three winning teams are to be awarded with $90,000 cash plus trophies.

The Challenge X competition is sponsored by GM and the US Department of Energy. Aside from the aforementioned awards, Challenge X also offer a real world bonus and since the start of the program General Motors has already hired over 40 students and still plans to increase this by over a dozen as the competition concludes.

About General Motors
General Motors Corporation or GM for short is the world's 2nd largest automaker in terms of sales revenue as of the first sales quarter of 2007 lagging behind its Japanese competition Toyota Motors. Founded in 1908 in Flint Michigan, GM employs approximately 284,000 people around the world.

GM's global headquarters are at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan, USA. But it manufactures its cars and trucks in 33 countries. GM the producer of high quality has also European headquarters based in Zurich, Switzerland. In the year 2005, 0.17 million GM cars and trucks were sold worldwide under the following brands: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Daewoo, GMC, Holden, Hummer, Opel, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, and Vauxhall.

GM is also the majority shareholder in Daewoo Auto & Technology Co. of South Korea and has had collaborative ventures in technology and manufacturing with other world's automakers.

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