Baja SAE

As UCI SAE Baja’s Chief Engineer and Project manager, I oversaw the tasks of five vehicle subsystems, managed our product’s finance and accelerated timeline, and communicated with companies for material and component purchases. In addition, I performed quality control by inspecting every component for potential static and dynamic failure modes to ensure overall vehicle reliability. 

The objective of the UCI SAE Baja team was to develop a reliable, competitive single-seater off road vehicle that met all SAE safety standards.

2020 Design:

In contrast to the history of SAE Baja at UC Irvine, preparation and design began during the previous year’s competition. This allowed for the design of the entire vehicle to be finalized and validated against the SAE Baja rule book before the beginning of the years instruction on September 26th, 2019. As the competition was on-going, returning members created a document of issues, concerns, and lessons learned to be addressed by team. This allowed for the consensus of redesigning components on the car only if it failed in order to focus on improving performance. Based on this analysis, we established the following overall objectives:

• Have a completed vehicle that fulfill all SAE Baja Safety standards one month before competition
• Increase torque ratio from 5.4:1 to 7.2:1 in order to increase torque output by 15ft lb 
• Reduce turning radius from 16ft to 8ft
• Create a prototype with newly designed components to test and validate the vehicles system integration

Scroll down below to see our 2020 vehicle’s overall design and specific design requirements for all 5 subsystem!

2021 Design:

Due to COVID-19 our labs were locked and instruction went to online in April 2020. Having three months of unlimited time at home and an ongoing list of lessons learned from our 2020 vehicle fabrication and testing, my team and I began designing the 2021 vehicle. In addition, wanting more of a challenge, we set out to change our vehicle from two wheel drive to four wheel drive. Based on this, we established the following overall objectives:

• Two wheel Drive -> Four wheel drive
• Maintain 8ft turning radius while switching from a linkage steering system to rack and pinion
• Reduce fabrication time while maintaining strength characteristics by redesigning suspension linkage components and minimizing tube bending

Feel free to scroll down below to see our 2021 vehicle’s overall design and specific design requirements for all 5 subsystem!