How far do you think you could go on a single liter of high-test gasoline? If you’ve always dreamed of pushing a vehicle to the absolute pinnacle of performance and engineering, then the Eco Mileage Challenge might be for you. Ever since the event was founded in 1981 a group of enthusiastic smarty-pants eco freaks have been pushing the envelope. In the high-octane class, a team called the Wednesday Club recently set a new world record achieving an incredible 7,080 miles. Honda got hundreds of hours of footage of the weirdly-shaped ultra-green cars going around sipping fuel, and like any sane automaker would, posted a few hours of ambient b-roll footage to YouTube and set the whole thing to some pretty chill beats.
There’s something otherworldly about this video. Not only do the cars appear foreign and move in a way that doesn’t make a lot of sense initially. Add that to some ethereal and relaxing vintage-sound city pop backbeats and you’ve got a recipe for the kind of thing that you could put on in the background on repeat as a soundtrack to your day. Make this the music you use to keep the momentum going on this post-holiday full-length winter doldrums week.
Whatever you’re doing is probably a lot more relaxing than racing for a fuel economy record. These drivers are shoved into cramped cockpits for hours at a time running at low speed trying to keep their fuel consumption to an absolute minimum. These little machines would never make it on the real mean streets of the world, but the engineering that goes into them might help Honda and other manufacturers build more economically viable road cars in the long run.
