With a steering wheel of carrot fibres, a chassis snatched back from the landfill, and running on a soup of chocolate and wine-making waste, the greenest Formula Three car ever to hit the road is scheduled to race competitively at Brands Hatch circuit in Kent this weekend. Despite the strange list of ingredients, this car is a piece of serious race-engineering, reaching speeds of 170 mph, it can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.5 seconds—better than many of its competitors. The car's inventors at the University of Warwick intend to show the racing world just what is possible from a sustainable vehicle.
Photo courtesy of University of Warwick Communications Office
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Could other cars be built like this in the future?
The price tag on the production of the current model was upwards of £500,000, so if you're talking about the possibility of mass-marketed veggie-coupes, that future is still a ways off.
The designers of the vehicle have not stated any ambitions towards development of street-licensed models just yet. Nonetheless, a large part of the push behind prototypes becoming mainstream technology is public interest, and the public appeal of a slick competitive performance vehicle with green credentials is good. Combine that with the current sense of personal and political urgency over reducing carbon emissions, and it might not be out of the realm of possibility in a niche-market.
Supposing a major auto company did take interest (a big supposition): it took a little over 3 years for the Toyota G21 project to become the first commercially-available hybrid vehicle (the Prius), and that was with the help of substantial government funding initiatives to create such vehicles.
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