Two years of work will culminate in April for Red River College Mechanical Engineering Technology students.

 

Since January 2016, a group has been working on building a battery-electric vehicle, and in April 2018, the team will compete at the Shell Eco-Marathon Challenge Americas in Sonoma, California in the Prototype category.

Matthias Harder is one of the students working on the project. He says test runs of the vehicle will probably start in a couple weeks, and he's very much excited to see how it works.

"We've been working on this for two years so it's going to be exciting the first time it actually starts rolling... hopefully nothing bad happens but we'll see. There's still lots of time to fix it; if it breaks it should break now," he said, laughing.

vehicleteam

The goal isn't speed, but to be the most energy efficient. Harder says they will go as slow as possible within the time limit.

"What happens is we accelerate and then we let it coast for a while, and then accelerate, coast, and every time we accelerate we coast until we take the next turn, so we don't actually have to use the brakes to get around the next turn."

Team member Bin Yang says their vehicle must travel six miles in under 24 minutes, and they'll get six tries at it. But the team doesn't know what the track will look like yet.

The vehicle is currently just over 24 pounds; the team is shooting for 45 pounds in the end and the driver (with equipment) must weigh at least 110 pounds. The vehicle is small, and in the shape of a water droplet.