Been there, done what?

(excuse the dismissive tone of this post; our Kaar is also part of this expedition)

80 teams, 80 cars from Asia. 20 from Pakistan!

You would think that this place is the craddle of Asia'a automotive industry. Some Maranello or Stuttgart, where they make Ferraris and Porsches and Mercedes and BMWs.

Truth is, they don't make a single production car in Pakistan. They tried making one, the Adam Revo...but its bubble burst well before it could stimulate a revolution. They tried making Suzukis via a technology-transfer agreement, but that flopped too. So what were twently 'fuel efficient' cars from Pakistan doing at the Shell Eco Marathon?

I am thinking of uploading pictures, with captious - you would be surprized how many such words they put in the GRE book - quips, but spare me that effort. That just one of those 20 managed to complete a valid run of the track suffices to indicate the difference between quality and quantity. China sent just one team (or maybe two) and those pandas crossed the 1000 km/L barrier.

Pakistan's one team that did complete the track did a breath-taking 53 km/L.

So the question is, what are we doing? Are we really making road-worthy - or even Shell Eco Marathon worthy - cars, or are we rolling up fiberglass on aluminum and hoping it works?

I don't know about the vehicles from other countries, but for us - maybe there were exceptions, but we weren't among them - the ratio of engineering to mechanicy stand at an unfavorable location. While one may doubt the caliber of Pakistani students, I am dead sure that there are two things wrong in the whole process. First, there is a little bug in our programming: For us, competition is all about going to Malaysia. Well, its not. I like to see F1 as something on which we can model our participation in Shell Eco Marathon. The best teams win. The not-so-best teams fight and try to get better. They compete in the long run. You can make a fuel efficient idea in a second, but fuel efficient vehicles will take years to mature (If hybrid was so easy and charming, Fords and Fiats would have their hybrids everywhere). Blah Blah Blah.

Second, in Project Kaar at least, I noticed that the engineering part - that we did - worked. I have come to conclude that engineering~planning~works. Mechanics find solutions that cause another problem. Their solution to the next problem causes another one. The cycle continues. In short: plan and trust yourself.

Enough patronizing. Now, get the hell out of here!