Last week, the FSAE Electric Racecar team was able to get the racecar running! After putting in an unhealthy amount of time assembling the racecar, we were able to get the racecar to drive with its own power. This milestone shows how much the FSAE Electric Racecar team have improved compared to last year. At end of winter quarter last year, the FSAE Electric Racecar team had a barely functional chassis. This year, the team is on schedule and ready to begin testing.

Having a running car is a major step towards our goal of placing in the top five at FSAE Electric this year. Now that we have a running car, will be able to follow our schedule and start testing. FSAE Electric is primarily a design competition, so to win, we must justify our design. To justify our designs, we need testing data to show how our designs affect the car’s performance. Testing also allows us to fine tune parts of the suspension and electronics so we can perform better at competition.

There were several systems that were successfully implemented for the first time in this racecar. Notably we were able to implement torque vectoring. Torque vectoring works by varying the amount of torque to each wheel, which improves how the racecar handles corners. We also were able to set up a CAN network which enabled communication between all the electronic systems on the racecar.

Overall, the FSAE Electric Racecar team has overcome one of our biggest obstacles for this quarter and built a running car. This means that we are still on schedule for competing in the spring and hopefully placing in the top five at FSAE Electric.