This is a humorously-titled reflection after ASC 2018, aimed at figuring out why our car seemingly does worse compared to the competition. Hopefully we can identify areas of improvement, knowing that these are obtainable baselines that other teams are able to meet.

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300 miles - 242 miles = 58 miles

Where are the other 58 miles going?

Note: We were targeting a cruise speed of 60 km/h (37 mph), but App State averaged a minimum of 42 mph assuming they started at 9 am and travelled 210 miles by 2 pm. We found that going 6 mph faster significantly increased our current draw so it would be unlikely that we would make 242 miles with 40+ mph. 

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Our NGM SC-M150 motors struggled a bit climbing the hill on our hill-start.

IV. Motor Controllers

App StateWe were running into a lot of issues with our Motor Controllers overheating. Supposedly a lot of teams either run with the WaveSculptor 20 setup that we have, or the WaveSculptor 22. This resulted in us having to frequently stop and allow them to cool down. 

V. Regen & Brakes

I was talking to App State after the stage stop on Day 6, and their driver was saying how he was regen-braking the whole way down the hill.

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I don't think we need to go full-on carbon fiber like Bologna (nor do we have the expertise), but we can definitely identify areas where we can save weight.there are potential weight-savings.

We had initially projected 506.8726 kg as the upper bound our weight, including 2 drivers and ballast. Our weight without the dropout and fairings (probably 10-20 kg in total) was 632.5 kg.

Even if we ignore the dropout and fairings, this a pretty big difference (~20%)

632.5 kg - 506.87 kg = 125.63 kg