The Formula SAE Electric competition is a competition held by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) at the end of every school year. It allows college level engineering students the chance to design a racecar, then compete against other college students racecars. The competition is broken down into two kinds of events: static and dynamic. In the static events, teams take on the role of independent engineering firms trying to sell their car design to be built to be sold to the public. They present the design and cost to judges and are scored based on how feasible the car would be as a product and how well it is designed. Dynamic events score the performance of the racecar as a vehicle, these events are the acceleration, autocross, skidpad, efficiency, and endurance events.

The main goal of this project is to build a car that fully meets all of the rules and passes the technical inspection for the FSAE competition in Lincoln, Nebraska and to have it running at least a 45 days before the competition. In order to meet this time deadline, we are working to keep our systems as simple as possible so that we can reduce both design and manufacturing time as well as overall cost of the vehicle. Since we have had trouble for the past couple of years getting the electrical systems running properly, we are also focusing on getting all of the circuits together and working before phasing over to designing the mechanical system.

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With the problem of global warming growing, the transportation industry is shifting away from internal combustion of fossil fuels to more environmentally friendly means (such as electricity) as a means of propulsion. Through the electric racecar project, we hope to train our engineers to become familiar with the unique challenges of designing an electric vehicle and to gain experience working with a large group of people to create a physical product that is not only safe, but affordable.