Welcome to 2018 from the eV Challenge

G’day all,

Now that for most schools kids are back to day and you’ve had a chance to clear your emails from the holidays, we’d like to say welcome back to 2018 from us here at the eV Challenge.

We’ve got three key pieces of information for you.

Firstly the 2018 regulations are online. As you can see we are at V2 which may get tweaked in the future but these are the rules for now. The main issues to look at from 2016 are again safety related with seatbelt mounts, locknuts, mirror visibility and adjustment and battery mounting slightly changed from last year. The battery supplier has been streamlined to the WA supplier Solarbike (mention you’re involved in the eV Challenge and get 10% off!!!), which has required a slight increase in battery capacity across all classes. We will monitor this performance of new vs old spec batteries at our march event and if required put into place a handicap system for the main event in November. Saying that some teams in Class B & C ran the bigger spec battery last year (as the supplier changed spec on us) yet the top 2 cars both used the older specification batteries – so the difference may not be as massive as it may at first seem.

Any queries on this again feel free to email us

and ask.

Secondly this https://youtu.be/E4xXaadFUMc . Enjoy it, and it may prove useful as a short intro video for you if you’re trying to get STEM funding or similar from your school finance committee, STEM committee, P&C or potential sponsors. We also have a longer, approximately 16 minute video aimed mainly at teachers with their classes almost ready to go, we’re just ironing out a few bugs. This second video will be better for showing students involved with eV Challenge programs more detail on the event itself, and for trying to convince teachers to come on board with us. I’ll let you all know as soon as that is on Youtube.

Finally we have an event provisionally scheduled for March 10 at the Hurricane Go Kart Club in Wundowie. We’re planning on running in the opposite direction to our usual events, i.e. anti-clockwise to mix things up a little. The Hurricane club are meeting this week and will discuss our proposal however the President was keen and happy for us to use their track again. As soon as its locked in we’ll let you know.

Hope your years starts well and we’ll look forward to seeing you on track in 2018.

Cheers