Green Automotive Engineer

Your car’s color says a lot about you. Red cars, for instance, are energetic, yellow cars optimistic, and gray cars pragmatic. When you’re a Green Automotive Engineer, however, you care less about the literal color of the cars you drive and more about the intrinsic color of the cars you make: green.

Black, white, red, or blue, all “green” cars are environmentally friendly automobiles that consume less energy and produce less pollution. If you’re a Green Automotive Engineer, it’s your job to create them.

Like a traditional Automotive Engineer, Green Automotive Engineers design, test, and produce cars, trucks, and SUVs, typically specializing in a single area of automotive design, such as auto body design, engine design, or fuel system design. Unlike a traditional Automotive Engineer, however, you don’t design cars that are powered by gasoline. Primarily hybrid and electric vehicles, they’re powered instead by electricity, or by alternative fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel, and hydrogen. As a result, you’re trained to combine questions of performance (safety, speed, torque, horsepower, etc.) with questions of sustainability (emissions, fuel economy, etc.).

A type of Mechanical Engineer, a Green Automotive Engineer is tasked with developing and presenting concepts for new or improved vehicles; using computer-aided design (CAD) software to create schematics of cars, parts, and components, often with the assistance of Drafters; making decisions about manufacturing materials and processes; overseeing the production of prototypes; and designing and executing testing procedures. Because you’re “green,” however, you do all of it with one goal in mind: creating cars that go from point A to point B quickly, comfortably, stylishly, safely, and — especially important — sustainably!