UBC Formula Electric Race Car

Goal $10,000

Raised $5,965

UBC Formula Electric Race Car

We’re building UBC’s first electric race car to compete in the annual Formula SAE competition against universities from around the world. Support our team and GM Canada will match your gift!

Story Description

Formula SAE is regarded as one of the most rigorous challenges for student engineers. It consists of 10 competitions across 4 continents attended by several hundred teams from across the world. Each team must design, build, test, and race a single-seat, formula-style race car each year, which is judged not only by its performance but also its design and cost.

UBC has been represented in the internal combustion category at the North American competition for 26 years, but this is the first time that an electric vehicle will also be competing. The two cars are developed by separate teams in close collaboration with one another – UBC Formula Electric and Formula UBC Racing.

UBC Formula Electric has spent the past two years designing and building our first vehicle, which will be competing at the Formula SAE Electric event in Lincoln, Nebraska in June 2017. We’ve worked hard with the combustion team to come up with a reliable chassis and suspension design, into which we’ve integrated our own high-voltage battery, control electronics, and some of the most power-dense electric motors in the world. Almost every component is designed, manufactured, assembled, and tested by students to meet the harsh demands of racing, and we can’t wait to put it all to the test.

Thanks to the incredible support of one of our sponsors, General Motors Canada, every dollar donated through this campaign will be matched to help us reach our goal. In addition, donors that contribute $200 or more will receive a complementary T-shirt courtesy of GM.

Challenges & the Impact of Your Support

Starting any new engineering student team from scratch requires significant amounts of time, effort, and funding. Electric vehicles in particular bring about an additional set of challenges – batteries, motors, and the various electronic systems are complex and expensive. Our generous donors and sponsors have supported us with many of our purchases, but we need additional funding to manufacture some of our remaining drivetrain components, produce our carbon-fibre bodywork, finish our low-voltage wiring harness, and transport our car and team to the competition.

About UBC Formula Electric

UBC Formula Electric was founded in October 2015 as a merger of the UBC Electric Car Club and UBC E-Racing. Neither team was a stranger to electric vehicles – the Electric Car Club converted the first EV to drive across Canada in 2010, and E-Racing was the first team to compete with an EV in the Knox Mountain Hillclimb in 2015. This previous experience gave us the confidence to tackle a new and more ambitious challenge with a sustainable long-term goal.

Today, we are a team of 35 students representing a broad spectrum of engineering disciplines and year levels. Developing an electric race car is an inherently multifaceted endeavour, drawing extensively from the fields of power electronics, kinematics, fluid dynamics, control theory, and embedded programming. Our members are armed with the skills and knowledge needed to become the next generation of engineers, joining the workforce to help develop some of the innovative clean technologies that the world will rely on in the future.