Breaking the record

With fuel prices reaching an all time high, a car built by a Bath engineer has broken a British record for fuel economy in a recent eco-marathon held in Scotland.

Andy Green, who works in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath, built the three-wheel car in his spare time and regularly competes in competitions to find the world’s most fuel-economic car.

The 'Team Green' car made the most of the clement weather at the Alford race track in Aberdeenshire to set a new British record of 6,603 miles on a gallon of fuel, beating the old record, achieved in 1999, by over 200 mpg.

To measure the distance a car travels, competition judges measure the fuel capacity of the car and then see how far it travels on one tank of petrol. Using just 4.61 cubic centimetres of fuel the car travelled an impressive 6.335 miles, the equivalent of 6603 miles (or the distance from Bath to Tokyo as the crow flies) on just one gallon of fuel.