College students show off hybrid and electric cars at NH Speedway competition

Hundreds of college students from across the country have descended on the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon this week to show off hybrid or electric cars they’ve built from scratch. The college teams are here for the annual Formula Hybrid + Electric competition.

NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spent some time in Loudon with Dartmouth College senior Joe McInnis, the school’s racing team captain.

Transcript

We’re currently next to the [Dartmouth] team’s garage at the Speedway, and your team’s car is in here. Can you describe for us what we’re looking at?

So we’ve got the car up on jack stands right now, just trying to spin the wheels. We just passed mechanical inspection and pre-electrical. So those are two of the tests that they make us do to be able to drive safely. So we’re just trying to get through the electrical demonstration now, which is when they make sure you [can] do this sequence of events in the right order so that your battery pack does the right thing and doesn’t explode when you’re on track.

How long has the Dartmouth team been working on this particular car?

This car has been in the works for a few years now, since the competition of 2022. At that point, the seniors that had designed it over COVID had graduated. So we were left with me and one or two other sophomores, juniors at the time, and there wasn’t much team left besides that. It was really on life support then.

So last year in [2023], we got a bunch of freshmen, now sophomores, and they learned a whole lot about the car really, really fast, particularly the electrical system. And they redesigned it from the ground up for this year and have done a really fantastic job of it. And it’s the closest we’ve been to passing inspection in a couple of years. It’s a strange feeling, feeling this confident about being able to pass. But there’s a little tension still as we try to work out the last kinks, but it’s a new feeling for us. So we’re super excited.

I imagine that there’s competition for who gets to drive the car. Is that true? Teams like this have to be pretty specialized, I imagine.

That’s one of the first questions people ask when they join the team is who gets to drive the car. And usually we just do it based on seniority, but sometimes the seniors are just too tired to drive the car. So we try to have some other guys on the team that are less tired to do that. And it also helps in the acceleration event to have a really small and light driver. So you can have a bunch of drivers. So it’s nice to let everybody who put work into the car get to drive at some point.

You’ve been doing this competition your entire college career?

That’s right. My very first year at Dartmouth I found the team. I thought, “This must be for grad students.” And it wasn’t, it was an undergrad team. And I had no idea what I wanted to do at that time, and I started hanging out and knew nothing about engineering and thought, “Okay, it’s just obvious I have to do engineering now so I can continue working on this car.” I’m hoping to stay in the automotive field. That’s the dream. I think that’s the dream for a lot of people here.

Why is the Dartmouth team particularly interested in EVs right now?

I think that Dartmouth College is thinking about emissions more closely, like everyone is right now. And I think this is a good way to bring some attention to that. And from our perspective on the team, we just think it’s really cool.

Any surprising stories that you could relate that you’ve had over the years during this competition?

There have been plenty of late nights. We had to get our temperature sensing system working a couple of years ago because we thought that was the last problem we had to deal with — and it and it never is the last problem you have to deal with — but we thought that at the time. So we stayed up doing this really, really tiny soldering of something like 900 components over five different PCB boards, just placing them carefully. And then we and then we cooked them in the oven to set everything in place because we didn’t have the actual tool to do it. So that was probably the craziest. But not going to be eating anything out of that oven anytime soon.