Forget the Toyota Prius, which can get as many as 55 miles per gallon. Four University of Colorado students say they are designing a car that should get 1,000 mpg when they start testing it sometime this week. Yet the team, which dubs itself CU LATER, probably won’t win the 2009 Shell Eco-Marathon in Fontana, California, next month, according to Boulder’s Daily Camera.

After all, last year’s winner, a high school team from Indiana, fielded a car that hit 2,843.4 mpg. These aren’t cars in a conventional sense, with seats for the whole family. They’re test models that accommodate just one skinny science geek. That’s the point. “It’s all about innovation in engineering,” says team member Simon Hodgson. “And to do that as an undergrad–it’s pretty cool.”