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Day one of the competition went well. That is the part that still bothers me. We passed scrutineering. We ran the slalom. We ran the acceleration event. Nothing broke, nothing caught fire, and the car we had spent a year fighting with did exactly what it was supposed to do. Then the results table went … Read more
Full throttle. Foot flat on the floor, motor howling, and the energy meter read 30 amps. That number is the reason our car had slow acceleration for most of a season. It is also the reason I now measure before I argue. Our pack and our controller were built to move a car down a … Read more
Reverse polarity damage sounds like something that needs big voltage. It doesn’t. At 8 p.m. on the night before our first test week, I connected a thin wire to our accelerator pedal with supply and ground swapped. The controller made one small click. Then nothing — no fault code, no beep, no light. Ten seconds, … Read more
Here’s something most drivers never think about: in almost every car built since the mid-2000s, the gas pedal is just an electronic input — there is no cable between your right foot and the engine. You’re not pulling a throttle open. You’re moving a sensor, and the sensor sends a voltage. Your foot is a … Read more
Our race car’s wiring, in our second year, was held together by WAGO connectors and optimism. The car is a Formula Student EV, built by Create Our Car (COC) at Chung-Ang University for the EV class of Formula Student Korea. Almost nothing on the car matched the original design — wires went in, came out, … Read more
The first time our student EV race car killed a motor controller, it took ten seconds and one wire. Twelve volts. I’m a third-year electrical engineering student at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, and I run the electrical systems on our team’s car — wiring harnesses, battery packs, CAN communication, and all the sensors nobody thanks … Read more