Welcome to our blog! We are the first registered university team competing in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize Competition and the only university team competing in the mainstream class. Unlike many other teams, our organization was founded specifically for the purpose of competiting in the PIAXP competition. Founded through Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management and the brainchild of Phillip Bell MBA ‘07 the team included two other members, Joseph Sullivan MAE ’07 and Kyle Rasmussen MBA ’08 in December of 2006. What started out as a small entrepreneurship project quickly burgeoned into a full fledged university project team.

With the help of Professors John R. Callister and Albert R. George, the group grew to 40 members by the Fall semester of 2007, 90 members in the Spring of 2009, and is currently made of 55 undergraduate and graduate students from six of Cornell University’s seven colleges including the College of Engineering, the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, the College of Human Ecology, and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. We also have a large faculty advisory board including Professor Jimmy Chang as well as two visiting academic fellows Professor Zhong Jiong Yang and Professor Bo Yang.

The university isn’t new to the whole sustainable transportation concept. Sometime back in 2000 a group of engineering students built a plug-in hybrid vehicle, similar to our car. Many other groups such as the Solar Decathalon Team and Sustainability Hub are also dedicated to solving climate change problems.

Where did Redshift come from? We polled 150 students across the campus, asking questions such as their favorite color, if they drove an automatic or manual car, and their average MPG then plugged the results into a proprietary name generating algorithm that spat out Redshift. If only.

The name has a much humbler origin. Our ever so creative team members pitched names such as “Ezra” (after Ezra Cornell, the university’s namesake), “Red Rocket”, and “Ion”, until Redshift simply got the most votes. It refers to the phenomenon in physics where the light seen coming from an object moving away from the observer is proportionally shifted to appear “redder” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift). More importantly, it also refers to one of the university’s colors. Go Big Red!