Electric Vehicle for TEKNOFEST Efficiency Challenge

Context

TEKNOFEST Efficiency Challenge is not a speed race. Vehicles are judged on the energy they spend to cover a distance. That single rule changes the entire engineering problem. In a conventional race, a marginal gain in power is worth having. Here it is only worth having if it costs less energy than it returns, and most of the time it does not.

Working under that rule is a useful discipline. It forces every decision — structure, drivetrain, electronics, driving strategy — to be justified against the same number instead of against a feeling about performance.

Approach

The approach was to treat the vehicle as one energy budget rather than a set of subsystems.

Energy leaves the battery and is spent in a small number of places: accelerating mass, pushing air, deforming tyres, heating losses in the drivetrain and electronics, and running everything on board that is not propulsion. Anything that does not reduce one of those terms does not improve the score, however good it looks on the car.

That framing sets the priorities. Mass matters twice, because it costs energy to accelerate and again to carry. Losses in conversion matter constantly, because they apply to every joule that passes through. And the driving strategy matters as much as the hardware, because the same vehicle covering the same distance can spend very different amounts of energy depending on how it is driven.

What I built

Work on the vehicle as a competition entry: the physical build, the electrical and control side, and the data used to decide whether a change was actually an improvement.

The part that generalised best was the measurement loop. Without telemetry from the vehicle, an efficiency decision is a guess — two changes made in the same week cannot be separated afterwards. Recording consumption against distance and conditions is what makes it possible to say that a change helped, and by how much.

The vehicle competed in the TEKNOFEST Efficiency Challenge Electric Vehicle Races and reached the finals.

What I learned

The clearest lesson was how much of efficiency work is subtraction. The improvements that mattered were removals: mass taken out, a loss path closed, a consumer switched off when it was not needed. Additions almost always cost more than they returned.

The second lesson was about verification. An efficiency claim without a measurement is an opinion, and opinions accumulate quickly in a team building under deadline. Deciding early how a change would be proven was worth more than any single change.

Note: this entry is a structural placeholder. The competition record is accurate; the technical write-up still needs the owner’s own detail.