For several years running, French engineering students from two neighboring Loire Valley schools, Polytech Nantes and La Joliverie, have shared engineering and effort to build rocket-shaped vehicles that captured top prizes at Shell Eco-marathon Europe fuel efficiency race. But the students began to feel there was something lacking in their cars’ perennially award-winning profile.

“It didn’t look like a car,” explained Nantes student Frederic Calvez.

So the students designed Cityjoule, a super-compact, but street-legal electric blue coupe powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. This weekend in Rotterdam, Polytech Nantes left all other competitors in the dust by clocking a result of 145.7 kilometers (90.5 miles) per kilowatt-hour, the energy equivalent of traveling 1,296.7 kilometers on a liter of gasoline, or 3,049.9 miles