In the eco-marathon 2007 which took place in Nagoro racetrack France, participated 257 teams from 20 countries. The winner in the prototypes category was the team from St. Joseph La Joliverie triumphed, which won the prize for the second year in a row for cars with petrol fuelled internal combustion engine. The best result achieved by a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle was by the Ecole Polytechnique Nantes. This French team produced a result of 2797 km to narrowly beat its nearest German rivals, the Hochschule Offenburg, University of Applied Sciences, (2716 km) and the Chemitz University of Technology (2552 km).
Another interesting category introduced to the eco-marathon in 2003 is the UrbanConcept, for vehicles that are similar to normal urban cars and more traditional in design than the experimental prototypes. In this category the DTU Roadrunners were two-time winners in the competition. Not only did the team from the Technical University of Denmark come first in the ‘Internal Combustion Engines’ category, they also won the Climate Friendly UrbanConcept Award. DTU Roadrunners were able to achieve 306 kilometers on 1 liter of fuel with an internal combustion engine while the Haagse Hogeschoool team from Netherlands did 557 kilometers on the equivalent of 1 liter of fuel with a fuel cell powered electric car.
The top ten UrbanConcept in the race this year ware able to do less than 0.5 liters per 100km (0.11 gallons per 62 miles) more than 10 times better than a conventional modern urban car. All the top UrbanConcept cars were also producing 1/10 times the amount of CO2 into the air making them interesting both in terms of cost and the environment.
