BU’s student racecar club is building a new and improved electric vehicle
Hundreds of student clubs will gather on Nickerson Field this Saturday, September 5, for Splash, BU’s annual extracurricular fair. There will be multiple performing arts groups, organizations promoting cultures from around the world, and hobbies active and sedentary. It’s safe to say, though, that you’ll find only one club devoted to designing and building an electric racecar. That is, a full-size, working, all-electric automobile capable of zipping around a track for 44 kilometers, or navigating a slalom course.
Terrier Motorsport, formerly known as BU Racing, enters this school year on a tailwind, boasting real competition experience that eluded past iterations of the club. Last spring, for the first time in its decade-plus history, the club qualified at Formula Hybrid, an annual collegiate competition for electric and hybrid vehicles, held at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Moreover, several members of the club earned a Design Excellence Award from the BU College of Engineering’s electrical and computer engineering department for the car’s safety system, which they submitted for their senior capstone project.
Not content to coast, this year the club plans to build a whole new car, incorporating a raft of improvements to make it sleeker and more reliable. At Splash, they’ll be recruiting for student engineers to help design and manufacture the new car’s chassis, motor, driver retention system, electrical system, and most everything else.
Terrier Motorsport isn’t just for engineers, though. They’re also looking to fill the myriad management and administrative roles that support the club’s efforts as a whole.
“We’re doing documentation, budgeting, sponsor outreach, event planning, social media,” says Teric Cheung (Questrom’28), Terrier Motorsport’s chief of business and operations. “There’s so much that goes into this. It’s a cross-functional, interdisciplinary team. That’s the benefit of a club like this; we all get exposed to different fields.”