MILA
Making range anxiety a thing of the past
The Endurance Car Project is a fully-electric, long-range sports car that will travel over 1000 miles on a single charge, breaking the Guinness World Record and pushing boundaries to address the issue of range anxiety in the electric vehicle industry.
The student team will design, manufacture, integrate and test the fully functional vehicle from the ground-up, making full use of skills learned both inside and outside the classroom.
To create our hyper-efficient vehicle, our team of students solve unique problems using radically new designs. Through our project we work with industry leaders to push the limits of today’s technology and promote a cleaner future for the automotive industry, while providing life-changing opportunities for Cal Poly students.
The car’s steel chassis is completed and intended to comfortably fit two people of any size. Weighing just over 300lbs, the chassis is designed with optimal viewing angles and occupant packaging to deliver the feel of a regular car. The chassis is also designed to protect the driver in a front crash, a rollover, and a wide variety of handling conditions. The PROVE team faced the challenges of learning CAD and FEA to contextualize the model and welding the frame.
Mila’s brake system consists of hydraulic disc brake system, inspired by industry designs to satisfy requirements of the CA vehicle code. The team learned and employed MATLAB to design and optimize the brake system. The PROVE team works with a number of modern software technologies like MATLAB and NX to better visualize and organize data.
Mila’s steering system consists of a mechanically simple, yet reliable rack and pinion system. The team developed a steering and front suspension simulator using MATLAB to design a novel steering geometry. The geometry minimizes bump steer and achieves near-ideal ackermann wheel angles.
Our battery and motor design is what primarily sets Mila apart from your traditional vehicle. The car requires an impressive number of lithium-ion cells to reach its goal — over 7000. That’s almost the same charge of 15,000 AA batteries! In fact, half of the volume of the car packages these cells.
Our front suspension, connecting the wheels to the chassis, consists of a double-wishbone suspension system. It was up to the students to decide the most appropriate and efficient means of designing the front suspension system. The design is completed in spite of the unconventional requirement of avoiding collision with an aerodynamic duct, and has a much stiffer camber curve than your traditional vehicle to ensure straighter tires and less camber for energy conservation.
The Endurance Car’s low voltage design focuses on taking inputs from the driver and relaying back monitored data. Using an industry standard Control Area Network (CAN) protocol, the low voltage team is currently assembling and testing components of the system. The set of engineers tasked for the job must answer a difficult question: What factors go into testing a design’s viability?
