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Shreveport is still waiting for car manufacturing to return to the area. Elio Motors has pledged to build it's fuel-efficient 3-wheeled cars here in the old GM plant. The company has unveiled three main goals for the powertrain team:

1. Up to 84 MPG for the highway drive cycle
2. The powertrain needs to be low cost
3. The powertrain needs to be comparable to current automotive quality standards.

Looking at these independently, each are not difficult to achieve, but together this is quite the challenge.

The original engine concept was to take the Geo Metro engine and create a template for the Elio engine.  Overall it is compact, perceived to be efficient, has the correct power requirements, and is relatively inexpensive to produce.  As the team began to dive into some of the details and changes to meet the desired Elio targets, one thing became apparent: the Geo Metro engine would not meet the fuel efficiency targets to enable the vehicle fuel economy goal of 84 MPG highway.

After running computer simulations, it was apparent that a new engine design was needed to work with the Elio vehicle to achieve this goal and still maintain a top speed of more than 100 MPH with a goal of 0-to-60 MPH in less than 10 seconds.

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