ECARUS - THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE WITHIN A COLLEGIATE PROJECT

The development of electric vehicles is a major challenge in the field of electrical engineering. The automotive industry will need lots of engineers in the next years who understand the key challenges in developing an electric car. In 2009, the Institute of Energy Conversion Technology at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Munich, started a project, in which up to 60 students are working on the development of an electric single seater buggy. Bachelor-Students as well as Master-Students of every semester can participate in this project. The whole project is completely organized by the students. Only technical and financial advices as well as coaching lessons are given by the research assistants. Beside the expansion of technical knowledge, this project structure enables the students to gain experience in project organization and team work. Within the team structure, there are team leaders, student advisors and team members. Team leaders and student advisors are usually of a higher semester, have certain knowledge about the project and technical experience. The team members have the opportunity to get a certain amount of ECTS for their work, which can be theoretical or practical. Thereby, the project perfectly fits into the bologna process, which claims an increase of teaching soft skills.
Depending on the technical goals of a project-phase, the whole team is organized in up to 6 technical groups, which focus on different technical details. E.g. there are teams, which are responsible for the design of the electrical drive train, the IT infrastructure or the battery management system.
In the past two years, the project was more and more improved by both the research assistants and the students. The students acquired several industry partners which support the project with hardware and financial support. Overall, the project leads to generally very good feedback from the students. Some of them wrote their bachelor’s or master’s thesis at the institute while they gained practical and theoretical experience in the project became visible in their scientific work.