Engineering Memory of the Month

A green Gremlin

Races featuring exotically modified cars are all the rage at Stanford Engineering these days. This July, a student-built car won its class in the American Solar Challenge, a solar car race from Texas to Canada. Also, this month an artificially intelligent robot car will attempt to drive a 150-mile desert obstacle course without any human help.

As it turns out, the 2005 solar car victory was a little bit of history repeating. Back in 1970, members of the Stanford Clean Car Club entered an American Motors Gremlin in the 1970 Clean Air Car Race from MIT to Caltech. They too won their class, “Internal Combustion — Fuel in Liquid Form,” in the race. The engineers made several modifications in the Gremlin to meet then-proposed 1980 clean air standards. Chief among the reconfigurations was getting the car to operate on methanol instead of gasoline.

Shown above, tinkering under the winning car’s hood are then students Henry Adelman, left, and Dana Andrews (also in a white coat). Former Professor Steve DeVoto is on the right. The two others in the middle were not indentified in the 1971 issue of Stanford Engineering News, from which this picture was scanned.

We invite you to share your memories of Stanford Engineering. Scan in your old photos from Stanford Engineering and send them to David Orenstein, manager, Communications and P.R.