A Push To Make Gasoline Engines More Efficient Third in a three-
part series The auto industry has work ahead to meet ambitious
fuel efficiency goals of 55 miles per gallon by 2025 — nearly
twice the current average required. Hybrid and electric cars
will play a role, but the plain old internal combustion engine
can't be overlooked. To find out where the new technology is
being developed to make more gas engines more efficient, I went
on a tour of an engine lab with professor Anna Stefanopoulou,
director of the Automotive Research Center at the University of
Michigan. I was expecting cams and pistons, but she first showed
me computers screens. "It's hard to see, since a lot of the work
we do is not necessarily only hardware [but] software,"
Stefanopoulou says. "If you really need to meet the [55 mpg
standard] and to do it cost-effectively, you have to do it
sometimes through strategy." Eventually Stefanopoulou and I
wound up looking at one of the dozen engines that they test
here. She says they test it once a