When it comes to automotives, Wikipedia describes ‘Jugaad’ as locally made motor vehicles, used mostly in small villages as a means of low-cost transportation in rural India. With ample instances of such creations trundling around the broken roads in far flung countryside, they are often looked upon as a life threatening object rather than a utility tool and legally not permissible by the Government.
Diverting one’s attention from the rural to the urban habitats, such builds are suddenly looked upon as benevolent creative concepts aiming at energy conservation. On similar lines, six students from Mumbai’s Somaiya College decided to create something of their very own.
Bunking classes, collecting piles of scrap before moulding it into a fibre glass creation that somewhat resembles to a car, the students plonked in a lawn mower engine onto the frame giving it three sets of wheels to move around. Termed as ‘Jugaad’, the fibre glass bodied car weighs only 60 kilograms and claims to render an astounding fuel efficiency of 300 kilometres to a litre of fuel.
One of the students Kunal Jain says “In our library was a book named ‘Jugaad Innovation’. We were inspired by it. That’s why we thought the name Jugaad would be apt for this car.”
Another member of the team Tony Thomas states “We would spend about 8-9 hours on this after college, sometimes bunk college to work on the designs. Then, we visited manufacturing units to get a basic idea.”
The car has to be driven in a posture of a formula 1 car and it took the team Rs.4 lacs to build. Also the speeds the car supposed to be driven at to be rendering such whimsical fuel consumption figures are not mentioned. Well there are a lot of questions waiting in the pipeline for the team, but at the present moment their efforts of bringing the concept to reality deserves a healthy round of applause.
The car is slated to be displayed at the Shell Eco-marathon in Malaysia in the month of July, where fuel efficiency is chosen as a major factor for judgment. We wish the team all the very best for the exhibition and further developments on their baby.
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