Imagine if Chevrolet handed you the keys to a new Camaro and told you to turn the sports car into something more environmentally friendly while still keeping the fun-to-drive aspect. Well, that's exactly what happened for the student teams that are participating in the EcoCAR 3 competition. It's the third in a series of competitions organized by the US Department of Energy and General Motors meant to provide experience and training to young engineers and other students at the 16 universities that take part.

EcoCAR 3 is now in the middle of its four-year run, and the teams recently finished putting their creations through the paces at GM's Desert Proving Grounds in Yuma, Arizona. The Ohio State University took top honors, making it three victories in three years for the Buckeyes (they won the first EcoCar 3 competition and the final EcoCar 2 competition). Virginia Tech and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University took second and third.

According to Trevor Thomkins (The Ohio State University), the team decided to convert its Camaro into a performance plug-in hybrid after conducting market research in several regions around Columbus, Ohio. That meant ripping out the 3.6L V6 and replacing it with a 160hp (119kW) 2.0L, four-cylinder engine that runs on E85 gasoline, coupled to a 200hp (150kW) electric motor from Parker Hannifin powered by an 18.9kWh battery from A123. The plug-in hybrid Camaro is able to do 45 miles (72km) on battery power alone and should be capable of 65MPGe.

The team—which is composed entirely of students, remember—also designed and built a custom power transfer unit as well as all the system integration for the car. Additionally, the team's hardware engineers spent a lot of time taking unnecessary weight out of the car and making sure that everything actually fit in the vehicle—swapping out that V6 for a smaller engine certainly helped in that regard. Thompkins told Ars that his team's big innovation is a system called DRIVE (Driver Recommendation for Increased Vehicle Efficiency), which is able to give drive mode recommendations after taking into account things like traffic.

Over at the University of Tennessee, Emily King told us that they decided not to go down the plug-in hybrid route, choosing instead to go for a hybrid system that charges the battery while driving. Like the team from Ohio, this was the end result of local market research. Big Orange also ditched the Camaro's V6 in favor of a 290hp (216kW) 2.0L turbocharged inline-four, and the UT team added a 113hp (85kW) electric motor from TM4. The 4.5kWh batteries also came from A123—in this case, the batteries were capable of delivering 105kW for 10 seconds at a time. Interestingly, Tennessee was the only entrant to use E10 instead of E85 fuel.

Although it weighs more than a standard V6 Camaro, King told us that the increased power keeps the 0-60mph time respectable (5.7 seconds), and it's nine percent more efficient than the donor car. Getting all the systems and control units (from different supplies) talking to each other properly was also a challenge, she told us.

The final team we spoke with was from West Virginia University, which won the "Team to Watch" award at the end of the competition. We talked to team member Justin Brumley, who explained his team had also gone the plug-in hybrid route. The internal combustion engine is a 183hp (136kW) 2.4L inline-four from GM, running on E85, supplemented by a 200hp (148kW) electric motor from Parker. A123 batteries were used again—the company is one of the competition's sponsors—12.6kWh in this case. Brumley told us that integrating all the components was a hard task, and they needed to relocate the fuel tank and move to a smaller engine for packaging reasons.

All three of the students we spoke with said that scheduling time to work on the car while still going to class was probably their biggest challenge. "We're all students," Ohio State's Thompkins said. "We can't spend the entire day building the vehicle. It's a labor of love."

But like any good extracurricular, the autowork appears to be rewarding. "You get to work with a lot of sponsors and gain a lot of experience," Tennessee's King said. "It's been really interesting coming in as not-a-car buff, understanding from an outside perspective all the work that goes into developing the car, both in design and marketing."

West Virginia's Brumley, who works as his team's engineering manager, has now lined up a job with GM partly as a result of his experience with the EcoCAR 3 project. "The amount of experience you get is amazing, from integration of systems and components, to construction, and also design," he said.

But this being a competition, there can only be one winner despite everyone benefitting. Thompkins and his colleagues from The Ohio State University took first place with 880 points out of a maximum of 1,000, earning $10,000 in the process.

"The second year of the four-year competition added a level of complexity that definitely tested each of the 16 EcoCAR 3 teams in reworking the propulsion system of the 2016 Camaro," said Al Oppenheiser, Chevrolet Camaro vehicle chief engineer. "Even with these new challenges, the students from Ohio State displayed an exceptional ability to integrate their Series Parallel Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) system, transforming this high-performance vehicle into a uniquely eco-friendly alternative. Achieving such results is an impressive feat given the short time that they had with the vehicle."

With two more years yet to run, we can't wait to see what these 16 groups of talented students come up with next go-round.

Listing image by The Ohio State University