One Gallon, Two Thousand Miles: The Car That Makes Gas Sippers Look Lazy

Forget everything you think you know about fuel efficiency. While the rest of the automotive world is racing toward electric vehicles, a team of students at Brigham Young University just built something that makes even the most miserly hybrid look like a gas-guzzling relic.

It’s called Supermileage, and it achieved 2,145 miles per gallon of fuel.

Let that sink in for a moment. The developers calculated that it would take just 1 gallon of fuel to drive from Utah to New York. That’s 2,000 miles on a single tank. Of course, there’s a catch—actually, several of them.

Supermileage weighs only 49 kilograms, or about 108 pounds. To put that in perspective, that’s lighter than most adult humans. The entire vehicle is stripped down to its absolute essentials, with a carbon fiber body and a fuel tank the size of a test tube—literally 30 ml, holding enough fuel for roughly 20 miles before you need to stop and refill. If you’re imagining yourself cruising cross-country in this thing, picture stopping every 20 miles to top up that thimble-sized tank. It’s also painfully slow: top speed clocks in at just 23 mph.

Oh, and there’s another restriction. The vehicle was designed for a driver of very specific dimensions. To fit in the only driver’s seat, you’d need to be no taller than 163 cm (5.4 feet) and weigh no more than 54 kg (119 pounds). This car wasn’t built with road trips—or most people—in mind.

Here’s the thing: Supermileage exists purely as an experimental machine for the Shell Eco-Marathon, a competition where teams compete to travel the furthest on the least fuel. It’s a proof of concept, not a production vehicle meant to actually exist in the real world. And that’s the real takeaway. In stripping away every modern comfort, every safety feature, and every practical consideration of an actual car, Brigham Young University proved something undeniable: fossil fuel engines can be extraordinarily efficient when you eliminate literally everything else. The question isn’t whether gasoline cars can sip fuel like hummingbirds—they can. The question is whether anyone would actually want to drive one that does.