When You Have a Wish…

Sometimes it is not easy to be the first. Our team at Kharkiv National Automobile and Highway University is the first one from Ukraine to build a fuel-efficient car and take it to Shell Eco-marathon. It’s very important for us, citizens of a young state, to convey information about our country, our history, our culture, and our customs to Europeans.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian society has not accepted the idea of caring about the environment and having a careful attitude about the production and consumption of energy yet. That is why we encounter a lot of misunderstanding from other people. We try to make our work as open as possible, we created a team blog, participate in different exhibitions and PR activities, and conduct study tours to the team’s lab. Usually we have more than 100 media items about our team during the year. This attention from the public and media helps us to spread the principles of Eco-marathon in Ukraine, and helps to find new financial partners for our team.

Our team’s motto is: When you have a wish, you have thousand possibilities; when you do not have a wish, you have a thousand excuses.

Ours is purely a student project, in which the team of young designers created the project of a special gasoline prototype, found sponsors for the creation of the car, made a strategy for participation in the competition and found companies that provided financial support for participation in 2010, 2011 and 2013. The main distinguishing characteristic of our project from other engineering student projects in the post-Soviet countries is that we make it without financial participation from our team members.

For each of us, participating in this race is great experience on a real technical project in which everyone can realize his or her potential. We are enthusiastic about the future, and we believe that soon, teams from other universities in Ukraine will join us for Eco-marathon.