Global Partnerships Competing for First Place in the Race for Optimal Fuel Efficient Technologies
September 22, 2009 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis 
Argonne National Laboratory’s senior staff signing a Memonrandum of Understanding with India’s NATRiP during a video conference call. From left: Larry Johnson, TTRDC director; Raj Sekar, a senior mechanical engineer; and Eric Isaacs, Argonne director. The laboratory is one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest facilities for science and engineering research. Photo courtesy of Argonne.
As competition intensifies among automotive companies to come up with the most fuel efficient vehicles that are also cost-effective to produce, some research groups are taking the alternative approach of global cooperation.
Argonne National Laboratory’s Transportation Technology Research and Development Center has just signed a partnership with NATRiP, India’s National Automotive Testing and R&D Infrastructure Project, through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop energy efficient transportation technologies.
This latest agreement will allow both groups to cooperate through information exchanges of publicly available research data, and visits to each other’s facilities.