The team bagged first place in Market Research, where they presented their research on Ahmedabad being the potential market for the car.
The team won second place in the Product Engineering phase of the contest where the students presented the engineering solutions that made the car unique with special features.
The team with their clear ideas on manufacturing plan, business model and factory plan to start production of the car bagged the second place for the Manufacturing phase.
Moreover, they emerged as the winners for the overall designing of the car. The collaboration of different teams during the design and engineering period entitled them to win the Overall Collaboration Award.
PACE is a corporate initiative between GM, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Siemens, with contributions from companies like Altair Engineering, 3D Connexion and MSC Software, among others.
The main highlight of the project was the concept of autonomous driving, wherein the car can self-manoeuvre through Indian roads and give the user complete freedom from driving. Various features like ‘in place turning’, drive by wire, steer by wire, interactive GPS frontal display etc. are unique features of the car.
The PACE project statement is ‘To design and engineer a Sustainable Urban Transport (SUT) solution for a specific urban area (city) for the year 2030.’ The PACE Institutes world over have been split into seven teams, with each team consisting of one design institute and four engineering institutes.
These seven teams will compete against each other in the final PACE Annual Global Forum, where the best idea will be chosen by an elite panel of judges based on various parameters like design ingenuity, product feasibility, collaborative skills and overall functionality.
Among the seven teams, PESIT was heading team number three. While PESIT chose to design the car’s propulsion, energy and steering systems; SJCE, Mysore another team member was in charge of the networking integration and the HVAC.
Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico was given charge of the suspension and braking systems. Michigan Technological University, USA handled the electronics and the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) of the car. And finally, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, being Team three’s design institute was in charge of the actual design of the car which includes exterior body and the interiors features.
This project calls for every team to have a complete independent design of their own. Hence, the overall design of the car was split up into various subsystems and each institute was assigned the task of the complete design and documentation of their subsystem. Apart from the SUT project, students involved in the PACE project were given an opportunity to present their individual technical papers at the same Forum to a global audience of peers and experts alike.
PESIT’s PACE team comprised six students, Viswanath Meenakshisundaram, Puneeth K B, Vishwas Bolanthur Pai, Royston Fernandes, Varun Balkrishna Rao and Shrutakakeerti Mallikarjun Vagishwari. The project was guided by Prof Satish SV, Mechanical Engineering Department, PESIT.