Mangalore, May 15: It has been reported that the new vehicle boast of a mileage of 40 km per litre and measures a mere 72 inches long and 47 inches wide from wheel to wheel was developed by 8th semester students of mechanical engineering of Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology (NMIT).
The vehicle was developed by Ayman Ataz, Anjum Naveed, Sachin Pinto and Prajwal K L under the guidance of Dr S Kiran Aithal, a professor in NMIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and is being advertised as an urban vehicle capable of seating “One adult and shopping bag”.
Since much of the body was built by using materials sold by scrap dealers, the team could develop the car only by spending Rs 28,000 on the prototype, Aithal explained.
In all, six inhererently different systems were adapted to create the vehicle, which contains an auto rickshaw engine and tyres,the gear suspension from Maruti 800,a gear shifter from Maruti Alto and the front suspension from a Kinetic Honda scooter.
The vehicle which weighs only about 130 kilograms, designed in such a manner that it can be turned in narrow streets without much efforts, said Aithal.
According to Ayman Ataz, one of the students involved in the project, this is the vehicle which can be used on congested roads without much difficulty. The two months old will be demonstrated at techno fest across various places of the country and hope that it will enter the Guinness book of world record as the world’s smallest car.The current record is the 1963 PEEL, which is 50 inches wide and does not have reverse gear. The P50 had a single door on the port side and boasted such luxuries as a single windscreen wiper and only one headlight. Only 50 were built, out of which 27 remain in existence.
Ataz explained that their vehicle trumps the P50 in mechanical reliability. The fact that we used an autorickshaw engine gives our car the added advantage of having a reverse gear, which the P50 does not have, he said.
According to the developers they were trying to create a fuel-efficient small car but ultimately they discovered that it is the smallest car in the world by track distance.
