How to make the design event better. [Archive]

Kevin Hayward

01-03-2015, 01:18 AM

GTS,

I also agree with most of your points. Some comments:

The videos should be edited. I know our students ended up putting a massive amount of time trying to get a perfect take. Much more time than would have been needed with editing for a worse end result. It was supposed to be a time efficient replacement for a design introduction. The restrictions make it very difficult to do, and the effort is not focused on delivering an introduction, but instead on the mechanics of trying to do a one take shot. However opening this up would end up with yet another big production / report. I say get rid of it altogether and assume the design report is the introduction to the design. (FSAE-A problem only)

FSAE-A needs formal design feedback delivered timely. There is currently none. A one person design review at trophy time would be a good start.

I wouldn't beg the top three to share. I would mandate sharing of the top three submissions for each static event. Ultimately we want to lift the bar everywhere. Protecting competitive advantages runs counter to the educational obvjectives. This can be done in Australia very easily. I have heard the complaint that this will disadvantage us compared to the world, but I think that is a weak argument to protect a couple of Oz teams at the detriment of the event goals.

I would also like to see means for contribution of non-attending members. In Australia with 4 judging teams each after around 6 students we would have needed to bring 24 people (assuming that some do not cover multiple areas). We had about a third to a half of that ready for the design event and suffered as a regard. We had no choice as we cannot force students to cough up the $1500 required to attend, as well as being from a small university. For example we had a junior member who was involved with testing the single (having done some great work), having to answer questions on a system he had nothing to do with, because the judges didn't want to wait for the system designer to finish his current discussion. I always liked the idea of a design finals for this reason. Choose your best small group and go up against the rest. Otherwise the big local teams get a big advantage.

Love the idea of a change itinerary or something similar. Teams are skirting very close to the minimal allowable changes and not suffering any consequences in design as a result. Photos of main systems such as chassis, uprights, wheels, intake, exhaust, engine, suspension etc that are kept each year (electronically) and compared to the new would be pretty easy to accomplish. Most teams take these sorts of photos every year with just a couple of juniors running around.

Kev

Moke

01-03-2015, 04:11 AM

For such a contentious topic there has been little activity here.

So far the focus in Australia has been the Victorian Automotive Industry. I would suggest that only a small minority of graduates end up there.

I think in 10 years there have only been 1 or 2 grads that have ended up in the Victorian Automotive Industry, with only maybe a doz that could be classed as working in the automotive field at all.

GTS in reply to your comments on the UWA apology thread and design feedback - I don't think every team would want to question every design judge, well some would but most would only be after a few clarifications. Some options could be limit the number of "requests" or scale it so top teams get less time than lower scoring teams. The idea being that the middle to bottom guys would benefit more from the feedback.

I hear you on the extra time requirements placed on the judges. Maybe those that can't stay 2 days could do a limited number Friday night or make more detailed notes and skype/email later. It might not be perfect to start with but it would be a start towards improvement and the process could then be re-assessed for the next year. I think it would be key to stress to the teams that and review would be a review of the scoring not a review of their designs and not a debate on the scoring. If a team doesn't want to respect the "rules" it's review over and worst case a return to no reviews.

I always used to laugh at the teams that would cover their cars up and close their pit doors so no one could see there "secrets". Top 3 should do a high level design presentation cover off their goals, team management, design processes etc rather than full on here are our numbers, laminate, drawings. If we were worried about copycat cars now then full disclosure would make matters much worse and they wouldn't learn a thing. There are some cases where a team might have commercially sensitive information, so maybe an exemption from disclosure could be sought before hand.

GTS

01-03-2015, 07:34 AM

Couldn't agree more, but could you please define what you mean by 'local' and 'industry'

Excellent point. The auto industry is much like a car on a brick life support system; there, but not gathering speed anytime soon. I'd actually consider a bit of a reflection exercise here to understand exactly where grads are going from the program, and frankly to understand where else university investment dollars are headed for project-based learnings with any touchpoints in automotive (I know of a few that aren't FSAE).

I'd personally love to see FSAE combined with a careers fair down here.

The videos should be edited. I know our students ended up putting a massive amount of time trying to get a perfect take. Much more time than would have been needed with editing for a worse end result. It was supposed to be a time efficient replacement for a design introduction. The restrictions make it very difficult to do, and the effort is not focused on delivering an introduction, but instead on the mechanics of trying to do a one take shot. However opening this up would end up with yet another big production / report. I say get rid of it altogether and assume the design report is the introduction to the design. (FSAE-A problem only)

This be The Truth. All videos bar one looked like Engineers Being Made To Play Nice For Camera. Excruciating viewing. The one that wasn't broke rules and did multiple takes. Even showed and explained car bits - very useful.

FSAE-A needs formal design feedback delivered timely. There is currently none. A one person design review at trophy time would be a good start.

Agreed.

I wouldn't beg the top three to share. I would mandate sharing of the top three submissions for each static event. Ultimately we want to lift the bar everywhere. Protecting competitive advantages runs counter to the educational obvjectives. This can be done in Australia very easily.

Agreed. Of interest - are there any information sharing licenses that you're aware of that'd let this happen if signed to? I know UniMelb has a department that (in part) deals with this sort of stuff, but it's not currently affiliated with FSAE.

I would also like to see means for contribution of non-attending members. In Australia with 4 judging teams each after around 6 students we would have needed to bring 24 people (assuming that some do not cover multiple areas). We had about a third to a half of that ready for the design event and suffered as a regard. We had no choice as we cannot force students to cough up the $1500 required to attend, as well as being from a small university. For example we had a junior member who was involved with testing the single (having done some great work), having to answer questions on a system he had nothing to do with, because the judges didn't want to wait for the system designer to finish his current discussion. I always liked the idea of a design finals for this reason. Choose your best small group and go up against the rest. Otherwise the big local teams get a big advantage.

If we could have the SAE-A approach my day job about this, we might even have solutions... this is something that absolutely has to change.

Love the idea of a change itinerary or something similar. Teams are skirting very close to the minimal allowable changes and not suffering any consequences in design as a result. Photos of main systems such as chassis, uprights, wheels, intake, exhaust, engine, suspension etc that are kept each year (electronically) and compared to the new would be pretty easy to accomplish. Most teams take these sorts of photos every year with just a couple of juniors running around.

Agreed. It's FSAE! Fortune should favour the brave :)

I think in 10 years there have only been 1 or 2 grads that have ended up in the Victorian Automotive Industry, with only maybe a doz that could be classed as working in the automotive field at all.

I'd make three but I was over 10 years ago as a grad and it took more than 10 years to get me into local automotive industry... in a corporate role no less :D

I don't think every team would want to question every design judge, well some would but most would only be after a few clarifications. Some options could be limit the number of "requests" or scale it so top teams get less time than lower scoring teams. The idea being that the middle to bottom guys would benefit more from the feedback.

I hear you on the extra time requirements placed on the judges. Maybe those that can't stay 2 days could do a limited number Friday night or make more detailed notes and skype/email later. It might not be perfect to start with but it would be a start towards improvement and the process could then be re-assessed for the next year. I think it would be key to stress to the teams that and review would be a review of the scoring not a review of their designs and not a debate on the scoring. If a team doesn't want to respect the "rules" it's review over and worst case a return to no reviews.

Agreed - we can't end up running DE twice over in terms of timing, but an extra four hours for one judge from each area (8 total) could well work.

If we couple this with a disclosed scoring breakdown prior, then those wanting to protest, can.

I always used to laugh at the teams that would cover their cars up and close their pit doors so no one could see there "secrets". Top 3 should do a high level design presentation cover off their goals, team management, design processes etc rather than full on here are our numbers, laminate, drawings. If we were worried about copycat cars now then full disclosure would make matters much worse and they wouldn't learn a thing. There are some cases where a team might have commercially sensitive information, so maybe an exemption from disclosure could be sought before hand.

(Contentious suggestions number... whatever)

How about the top three get to present their design in front of the entire competition and judging panel, and are marked competitively as a result, with the marks presented openly at the time?

MCoach

01-08-2015, 09:42 PM

How about the top three get to present their design in front of the entire competition and judging panel, and are marked competitively as a result, with the marks presented openly at the time?

Isn't this how the business presentation event is done? I know it is here in the States.

Swiftus

01-09-2015, 12:14 PM

Isn't this how the business presentation event is done? I know it is here in the States.

I think at Michigan the top 3 business presentations will present to a crowd, but their placing is decided before they ever get on the stage. At FSG and FSA the top 3 get up and are scored against each other for the podiums.

GTS

01-10-2015, 12:52 AM

Contribute, people, for the Aus competition has a potentially shorter future than many realise...

Mitchell

01-10-2015, 09:32 AM

I believe the main improvement for this event lies in the judges/organisers hands. SAE-A has the potential and people to hold the best DE in the world.

In order of importance:
Every judge goes on a 2 day training camp ~1 month before the event. At this camp the intentions of the event, the expectations of the judges and teams are clearly laid out and explained. 1 day is dedicated to going through every teams design report as a group. Ideally this weekend would be run by someone who is truly interested in improving the educational value of the competition.

Judge sourcing needs to be reviewed. While I don't doubt the ability of the judges some do not seem to understand the point/challenges of FSAE. There are many interested and dedicated alumni around - the SAE-A needs to put effort into finding them and giving them design judge priority. An example of this is a VD judge reviewing our mechanically mode separated beam axle car (which required explaining, even though it was explained in the design report AND video) and the only question I recall was "how do you adjust camber?"

Judges need to bring annotated design reports with them to the event. They should note questions they plan to ask, including topics potentially overlooked in the report. Once an answer is received (or not) they need to move on to the next topic. 15 minutes is not enough to try and think of questions on the spot. Things that are explained in the design report should not need to be explained again and again, this is a waste of time.

The judges need to be on time. If they start late, they need to finish late. Penalising teams because the event is not running to schedule is poor, this is a project management competition - what is going on SAE-A?

Teams should be able to allocate weighting to design event sections with justification. If a team believes investing engineering effort into elaborate engine tuning is a waste of time and can justify why, they should be able to reduce the weighting on their engine/driveline scoring. Obviously a minimum weighting would need to apply. Maybe 25 points for all four sections and an extra 50 that teams can allocate - but they must justify it.

Getting to crazy ideas now; potentially have a "peer review" section where each team is allocated a number (3 or 4?) of teams that they must go and question and give a peer score to. Don't release the information until the day, for example: at 12pm a volunteer comes and collects 2 team members from team A. They take them for 15 minutes each to team B, C and D. This idea needs development but I just wanted to put it out there.

Finally feedback for the event needs to be released with the points. There is a 1 hour protest period (although whether this rule would be enforced is questionable) and yet no feedback til weeks later? how is a team meant to lodge a formal protest when they do not even know where they lost points? On the topic of feedback it needs to be clearer. Comments like "long pushrod" when nobody on our team was asked anything about pushrods suggests that the judges are just having a glance and finding a way to give everyone 70-85% much like a disinterested tutor/lecturer marking boring reports.

GTS

01-10-2015, 05:05 PM

Good! More...

Come on everyone...

Moke

01-10-2015, 06:17 PM

Maybe the thread needs to be on a somewhat unrelated topic? This thread is will now be known as "Why skid pan should be worth more points than accel"

Mitchell

01-10-2015, 07:19 PM

I think the inactivity is due the location within the forum, people only really read the open discussion.

01-10-2015, 08:04 PM

Soon, soon... :)

Much to write on this topic, but too much to do elsewhere...

Z

JulianH

01-11-2015, 03:55 PM

I'm asking myself if this is a FSAE Australasia forum right now... It is impressive how you guys from down under are able to discuss here.

I try to share my views of the "European DE".
My background: I was part of the most successful team in the Design Event in the last years. Zurich made all Design Finals since 2010 that we could get into and we won a lot of them (Sweep in 2013: UK, Germany, Austria, Italy; Won Austria and Spain 2012, 2nd in Germany, 4th in the UK and so on...).
Do I think we were the "smartest" or the "most educated"? Not really. I think we figured out how to tackle a Design Event, we knew the right stuff, we had a lot of training and maybe after some time a reputation to be good in design. We actually wouldn't have made the UK Finals in 2013 but the Chief Judges "corrected" us in the Finals, where we won.

I started doing Design Judging in 2014 in Austria, I judged Aero/Cooling and Main Concept/Project Management.
To be honest, I was shocked.
In Zurich I was responsible for writing and "proof reading" the Design Report for a long time, so I had a feeling what is considered a good report by the judges and what isn't.
I read all design reports of the FSA competition. I think FSA has one of the best field world wide but what I read was sometimes really horrible. A lot of the reports were just rubbish. Z would have tackled all of them ;) (Nearly all students took an example in the rules on how to write a bad engineering report. "Business words", not at all precise and so on).
Even teams that built their 5th or 6th car weren't able to stick to the page limit or used a table of contents on the first page...

So the first thing to improve for DE is to ensure that students hand in a good design report. If the judges get a bad report, they are not willing to put a lot of effort in it. They stick to their "basic line of questioning" without getting into the report. I think that is not the right way.
I tried to give feedback to all the teams that I judged the day after Design. A lot of them were not interessted in what I said about their report. I'm looking forward to see the 2015 reports if they used my comments to make their reports a bit better. I don't say that there is one perfect way, but just putting a 3D drawing of your car on the extra page is just useless.

The second thing: Judges should read the design report. I mean we had a really nice and friendly group of judges in Austria but I had several co-judges that didn't read a single report, didn't look at one drawing or didn't even prepare questions. I think that is terribly wrong. Not all judges are a GTS or a Stefan Liechti that prepare really well for that but a basic knowledge of the teams should be necessary.
Maybe we could reduce the length of the Design Report to one page. Like an Executive Summary in the Business presentation. Just justify your top-level desicions so that it is a basis of your design judging but not more.

I think it is not feasibly to have judges do an extra 2 days of preparation. It is difficult enough to get judges. Don't give them more work load.

Next:
In the judging, I have to give points from 0 to 20 in my category. I have maybe 10 teams. In my opinion it is not possible to rank all 10 of them "fairly". I have like 5-6 minutes after each judging to make notes (because the team should get feedback..) and make a judgement call on how many points that performance is worth.
Well that's just one point. The other point is, all other judges have the same problem. At some competition this subjective is offset by some "chief judges" that look if some groups give higher points or not. At Austria this was done be making different judging groups for all teams (random selection of all judges so that every area of the car should be checked but it is not the same group twice).
It is still difficult to look if you are "too nice" or "too strict" with your points. And nobody says what "a perfect score" would look like...

To be honest I have no solution for this problem. It would be best to look at all teams and make a ranking as good as possible. But that is not possible for like 110 teams.

One more point: The students should always have a back-up. I judged a really good design team in Austria in Aero. Their Aero guy wasn't at the competition, so I had to interview his understudy or something. I didn't know a thing. Not one thing. So I had to score them really low. That is frustrating.

Last but not least: The scoring categories. I want to have a real "Main Concept" category where I can give points on how the team choose the concept and what they have done with it. So far this is not well judged in the DE.
And yes, throw out stuff like "creativity" or "style". It is stupid.

Z, I think "killing" the DE is not a good thing.
Students "justifying" their solution is an important part of the job in my opinion. Some teams that don't have the resources to build an overall competition winner can still perform really good in Design and can show "the world" (aka their sponsers) that they are a good team.
I think nearly all competitions are decided on the track. So yes, the fastest car probably is going to win the competition if they don't make an error. In 2013 GFR placed 13th in DE and won Germany... by 80 points.
And yes, we all now know about the horrible 3/200 score. Geoff apologized. I think such a farce will not happen again. Please do not use it as an example for "killing DE" again. It is played out :)

Last but not least: I think about 5-6 team members of us got an internship at really nice companies (LMP/F1) offered during design judging because the students impressed their judge. I think that is one good point.

Cheers,
Julian

Big Bird

01-13-2015, 10:41 PM

Some great feedback here.

Just a quick point relating to Mitch's excellent idea about a design judges retreat. I don't think every judge needs to attend. Rather, a core group of Design Event staff could meet two weeks in advance and identify key points that should be discussed for each team, and prepare briefing notes for each design group for each car. This would include potential questions for the judges to ask on the day. I think such a retreat could help make the event more portable, since the structure of the design event questioning could be prepared in advance, and given to judges on the day - no matter where the event is held

GTS

01-14-2015, 12:12 AM

Big Bird

01-14-2015, 04:55 AM

Yeah, I reckon that would be good GTS. The team leaders could then prepare questions for their individual team members, based on known area of expertise.

Can't see why we couldn't teleconference the findings of the retreat to the known judges on the Sunday night, or some other reasonable time

Cheers,

Geoff

DMuusers

01-14-2015, 05:09 AM

I think the first part of making the design event better is a consensus amongst all competitions on what design event is actually scored on. I know that FSUK has far more focus on manufacturability, performance v cost, etc. than FSG for example (not saying that that's a bad thing per se). So are we discussing design event in general or just design event for one competition?

Big Bird

01-14-2015, 05:13 AM

GTS

01-14-2015, 05:13 AM

I'd not be unhappy to stick to FSAE-A - the competition is in a very difficult place right now - though if the discussion generates learning that can be applied elsewhere, so be it.

GTS

01-14-2015, 05:17 AM

p.s. I was the nong who suggested and designed the Design Video. I think the motive was explained at the time - we didn't want to waste valuable time in the 15 minute design presentations doing top level overviews.

I never saw the design video as compulsory, rather as an additional opportunity to impress and communicate with the judges. The one-take restriction, as for the restrictions on props, were imposed so as to limit the time and expense of the video shoot. I was hoping that the teams might give a quick overview of what they wanted to achieve with their designs - particularly what areas they considered to be important, and what areas were less important.

As for dropping it because it has been poorly done - well a lot of teams do poorly at the Endurance Event. Should we drop that too?? :)

If it helps delineate between teams - then why not leave it in??

Don't drop it, it's a good thing. Some of them are hysterically bad though, as in the students look like deer in headlights. For 2+ minutes in one glorious take.

It might need some criteria around it though I'd suggest multiple takes just so they can put more effort into talking about the project and less into ensuring the manage one (glorious) take. And if they can run through some key bits of the design as it's there in front of them it'd be great too.

I'd think if it's something done capably it should be able to serve students for more than just the competition: sponsors, interested parties etc...

Big Bird

01-14-2015, 05:25 AM

Good call GTS. It did need more explanation. And maybe no more than 5 different takes?? Agreed the car would be a good prop.

Big Bird

01-14-2015, 06:51 AM

JulianH

01-14-2015, 09:35 AM

Geoff,

I like the idea of prioritizing but in my experience you need to "fix" a couple of things in order to make that work.

We developed our own motors since 2011, so naturally we were really strong in that area of design. We always had the "motor guy" in our design team. At about 2/3 of all DE, no judge was able to ask the motor guy questions about motor design because it is a very unique area. Sometimes it was "what power/torque does it have". That was about it.
At -I think it was FSG 2012- the "powertrain judge" just asked "What is the critical temperature of part A,B,C,D...." that was powertrain judging.

So if you have to make a desicion to weight your design areas, you have to know what kind of judges do you get. Sometimes you are lucky and get the "one" expert in the whole DE judging team in your cue. But most of the time you have a problem in a specific area.
At an event like FSAE-A it could probably work because all teams get the same judges.

The next "problem" is, that most judges that I had as a participant didn't really care about the "area of design" they should focus on. Most of the time the judge which introduced itself as Aero judge started with 2-3 Aero questions and afterwards asked about basically every detail of the car, from tires over torsional stiffness to powertrain data. If this judges is only grading the "Aero section" but takes the whole "experience" into account, it probably gets complicated.
I don't want to take the freedom away from the judges though, to ask something from other areas which could be interessting to get the overall impression of the team.
How is that handled at FSAE A?

GTS

01-14-2015, 02:56 PM

I like Mitch's idea of a variable points allocations. We dont want teams dismissing areas outright, but it would be good to have some flexibility to suit different teams' design interpretations.
My thoughts.
* Break the car into a number of subsections (e.g. chassis, suspension, aero, ergo, etc)
* Prior to the event, the teams nominate the number of points each subsection is worth, within a set range. e.g ergo might be between 5 and 10 marks. This will reflect their team's design prioritizing. Their justification is assessed in the design management section
* judges score each section in terms of percentages (0-100%), final points per section is points weighting x percentage

If this were to work, it'd be amusing to see teams nominate their own weightings (because I've a fair idea what'd happen next :D)

The next "problem" is, that most judges that I had as a participant didn't really care about the "area of design" they should focus on. Most of the time the judge which introduced itself as Aero judge started with 2-3 Aero questions and afterwards asked about basically every detail of the car, from tires over torsional stiffness to powertrain data. If this judges is only grading the "Aero section" but takes the whole "experience" into account, it probably gets complicated.

No such aero problems at FSAE-A :) We guarantee 15 minutes of aero, which some of you are quite good at answering.

bob.paasch

01-14-2015, 04:56 PM

I'm asking myself if this is a FSAE Australasia forum right now... It is impressive how you guys from down under are able to discuss here.

I agree Julian, it's nice to see some introspection on the part of the FSAE-A design judging organizers. I hope the other major FSAE/FS design organizers will join in.

Last but not least: The scoring categories. I want to have a real "Main Concept" category where I can give points on how the team choose the concept and what they have done with it. So far this is not well judged in the DE.
And yes, throw out stuff like "creativity" or "style". It is stupid.

Not necessarily stupid, but necessarily inconsistent per the peer-reviewed research I've referenced previously.

I think nearly all competitions are decided on the track. So yes, the fastest car probably is going to win the competition if they don't make an error. In 2013 GFR placed 13th in DE and won Germany... by 80 points.

It is possible to win the competition without scoring well in design, but it certainly makes it more difficult! Julian, your example shows something even more important and germane to this topic, and that is the inconsistencies in design judging and design evaluation criteria between competitions. With the same car, design team and design report, GFR combustion's 2013 design placings were:

1st at FSAE Michigan
13th at FS Germany
2nd (1st combustion) at FS Austria

This pattern repeated in 2014. With the same car, design team and report, GFR combustion:
4th at FSAE Michigan
20th at FS Germany
1st at FS Austria
3rd at FS Spain

The design judges at FSG are obviously looking for something different from the car and team than the other competitions. Also, the design priorities of the FSG design judges do appear to not match those of GFR combustion.

Geoff,
I like the idea of prioritizing but in my experience you need to "fix" a couple of things in order to make that work.

We developed our own motors since 2011, so naturally we were really strong in that area of design. We always had the "motor guy" in our design team. At about 2/3 of all DE, no judge was able to ask the motor guy questions about motor design because it is a very unique area. Sometimes it was "what power/torque does it have". That was about it.
At -I think it was FSG 2012- the "powertrain judge" just asked "What is the critical temperature of part A,B,C,D...." that was powertrain judging.

So if you have to make a desicion to weight your design areas, you have to know what kind of judges do you get. Sometimes you are lucky and get the "one" expert in the whole DE judging team in your cue. But most of the time you have a problem in a specific area.

Another example of this problem, the 2014 GFR c-car had one of the highest levels of aerodynamic downforce per kilogram vehicle mass of any car in FSAE/FS history. Our design judging queue at FSG14 had no aerodynamics judge.

I'd like to expand on my post from the FSAE-A 2013 design judging thread:

This process is expected of FSAE teams by the design judges, and I would expect it of the FSAE/FS design event organizers as they design the design judging process. Who are the customers, and what do they want? Prioritize those qualitative customer requirements, and develop a measurable set of quantitative engineering requirements by which any proposed design judging processes can be benchmarked against the existing process.

Who are the customers/stakeholders for the FSAE/FS Design Event? The organizers themselves, certainly, but also the student design teams that participate. Also, the companies that supply the design judges, as Julian mentioned many of them are looking for students to hire. The universities that support the teams, and the faculty advisors that mentor the students.

What do the stakeholders want? The organizers want a score for each team, with manageable resource (especially time and money) requirements.

What do the students DE participants want? They want a fair and transparent process. What is "fair"? They want to know the evaluation criteria, they want a fair chance to perform and prove their knowledge, and they want feedback on their performance in order they can improve. They almost always want to know why and how the teams that placed above them did so, and that the design judges had good logical reasons for placing the teams the way they did. To me, that means the DE and Design Judges must employ a consistent set of criteria for judging the "goodness" of the vehicle and the knowledge of the team. Those criteria should come from the Design Objective, as stated in the rules:

A1.2 Vehicle Design Objectives
For the purpose of the Formula SAE competition, teams are to assume that they work for a design firm that is designing, fabricating, testing and demonstrating a prototype vehicle for the non- professional, weekend, competition market.

A1.2.1 The vehicle should have very high performance in terms of acceleration, braking and handling and be sufficiently durable to successfully complete all the events described in the Formula SAE Rules and held at the Formula SAE competitions.

A1.2.2 The vehicle must accommodate drivers whose stature ranges from 5th percentile female to 95th percentile male and must satisfy the requirements of the Formula SAE Rules.

A1.2.3 Additional design factors to be considered include: aesthetics, cost, ergonomics, maintainability, manufacturability, and reliability.

A1.2.4 Once the vehicle has been completed and tested, your design firm will attempt to “sell” the design to a “corporation” that is considering the production of a competition vehicle. The challenge to the design team is to develop a prototype car that best meets the FSAE vehicle design goals and which can be profitably marketed.

A1.2.5 Each design will be judged and evaluated against other competing designs to determine the best overall car.

The design criteria for the vehicle can be summarized as performance (as measured by the FSAE/FS events), ergo, aesthetics, cost, maintainability, manufacturability, and reliability. I personally think aesthetics should be thrown out as inconsistent and unmeasurable. Whilst other criteria could be added by the design judges and/or organizers, such addition is contrary to the rules of the competition and inconsistent with proper design process. The goal of the student designer is to design a product/system/vehicle that meets the published rules and with "goodness" measured against the published criteria. Sorry students, but adding a feature, creative or not, that doesn't make the car faster, cheaper, more ergonomic, etc. is a waste of resources and should be penalized as poor design process.

A fair and transparent design evaluation process evaluates the design process as presented by the student team, with the car as final proof-of-process. Given the stated Vehicle Design Objective above, the most important criterion is performance, with ergo, maintainability, etc. as additional design factors. Performance and cost are explicitly measured in the competition, and one design can be directly compared to another using the common currency of competition points. A fair and transparent design evaluation process would include specific criteria for ergo, maintainability, manufacturability and reliability, and a method for comparing design tradeoffs in these areas with performance and cost.

As always, I welcome comments.

Big Bird

01-14-2015, 05:55 PM

The thing that I find disappointing about this event is that the teams don't really progress in their understanding of engineering from year to year. Each new team comes in and the same projects are handed out. So the FSAE project becomes a series of component-driven tasks - some design chassis, some design wheels and hubs, some design pedal trays etc. The marks breakdown in the rules drives this too. We think of this firstly and foremostly as a parts design event.
I was looking at the Curtin Uni car at FSAE-OZ 2014, and it was one of the best examples of quality control and race preparation that I had ever seen. Fasteners all correctly fitted and marked with paint, beautiful lockwiring, and from what I saw their raceday management seemed spot on. It made me wonder why we can't accommodate such excellence in the Design Event.
What I am thinking is with the abovementioned flexible points allocations for design, each team could nominate their own "feature" category, where they pick an area of engineering and present a special presentation on it. Maybe a two to three page report on it, plus a five minute presentation on, say, the saturday night to an open audience. You could even steal 25 points off the presentation event to facilitate it.
We then have an enticement to think more broadly (maybe presentations on pit management, OHS breakthroughs, vehicle dynamics, or whatever. We all see something new, and there is some enticement to break out of the same old "we have redesigned our pedal tray to be lighter and stiffer than last year" mindset.

Big Bird

01-14-2015, 05:56 PM

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Forgot to close bracket in previous...

mech5496

01-14-2015, 10:56 PM

The design judges at FSG are obviously looking for something different from the car and team than the other competitions.

We came to the same conclusion; however in our case we *think* we know what they require. We are building an e-car, and for some reason lack of major self-developed e-components, albeit justified, costs us lots of points, at least based on feedback...

Sorry students, but adding a feature, creative or not, that doesn't make the car faster, cheaper, more ergonomic, etc. is a waste of resources and should be penalized as poor design process.

A fair and transparent design evaluation process evaluates the design process as presented by the student team, with the car as final proof-of-process. Given the stated Vehicle Design Objective above, the most important criterion is performance, with ergo, maintainability, etc. as additional design factors. Performance and cost are explicitly measured in the competition, and one design can be directly compared to another using the common currency of competition points. A fair and transparent design evaluation process would include specific criteria for ergo, maintainability, manufacturability and reliability, and a method for comparing design tradeoffs in these areas with performance and cost.

Could not agree more! Maybe (in order of preference): Performance, manufacturability, a method for comparing design tradeoffs in these areas with performance and cost, ergo, maintainability, reliability...

Big Bird

01-15-2015, 12:33 AM

Thanks Julian,

In regard to the comment about needing the right design judges if teams could self-prioritize, it would only work I think if we were to do the abovementioned Design
Event retreat two weeks before the event. Then we could make sure that we knew in advance what judging expertise we needed in advance and recruited accordingly.

I've been thinking more about it and self-prioritizing could be a really interesting exercise and could inspire some innovative designs. Of course, we would set minimum values o the allowed range, and would put a high minimum value on engine systems to encourage work in this area. But the variable weightings in general would make the teams a little more proactive in driving their designs and understanding and owning their decisions.

Cheers!

JulianH

01-15-2015, 05:43 AM

Bob,

I agree that it is a problem that different competitions are looking for different things in DE.
For us, it was always FS UK with a stronger focus on "simple manufacturing" and the rest of the European events looking for more "oh yeah, that's awesome".
But you experienced the "special statics" in the UK 2011, if I remember correctly...

Do you know if the strong difference in design scoring (especially in Germany) is a "GFR thing"?
We -and our competition- always placed very comparable throughout a year, so I am not an expert how this "problem" is in the combustion world.

I talked to a lot of judges last year (in order to prepare myself for my turn in judging..) and I think there is one "GFR specific" problem out there: (From an outsider perspective, because all judges are basically outsiders!) You dominate the performance part of the competition with a perfectly figured out car that is evolved since 2010-2011 with nothing really changing besides a bigger aero every year. A lot of judges do really have a problem with that ("They don't know why their car is fast, the "Chris Patton"-generation made the car fast and they are just sticking to it" and so on). I also witnessed a judge in the FSA finals that placed GFR last "because they show up with the same car over and over, that is not the spirit of the competition"... So maybe that explains why you especially have a "fluctating" DE placing.
What is your desgin feedback in Germany the last three years? You won Design in 2011 and afterwards dropped significantly but I'm sure that your preparation is roughly the same.

As I was never at FSAE Michigan, I have to ask from the outside: I heard -especially from the German GFR guys...- that the US teams are significantly worse prepared for DE compared to the "big" German teams. Is that true? E.g. Michigan 2012 only GFR and ETS (with a reputation of very good design) made it in the Top 6. All German teams that made the trip basically placed in the Top10.
In 2014 at FSG, we had Washington, Akron and OSU in a good position.
Would you say that DE in the states is different compared to say FS Austria (where you place comparable...)?

GTS

01-15-2015, 07:30 AM

Bob, I was wrong in our offline discussions. I was adamant we don't score innovation in the Australian competition. I was wrong, we do. I advocate throwing it out as an explicit criteria. If something is innovative for good, demonstrable reason, then it'll show up in the other criteria, period. I'd delete the aesthetic requirement whilst we're at it as that much is subjective. Any car that wins its competition is beautiful.

We have some critical problems in communicating what the competition is about and in establishing what a good DE looks like, there are three key reasons (my observations):

1
Many students (and some faculty) don't actually appear to read the rules. They're not actually aware that FSAE is not a competition to build a quicker car than last year at all costs. FSAE is not motorsport. The number of people getting to competition after a year's investment to discover this much at DE... is frankly staggering. Many have zero idea of the Vehicle Design Objectives. Zero.

2
Good DE are not communicated openly and transparently. Part of it is the feedback against the rubric, part is lacking communication, part is simply not recording the DE for review. If you asked the 2nd placed team what separated them from the 1st in DE, there's literally nothing to point to beyond the headline number.

3
Having judges pull a car out and point out what's wonderful about it doesn't actually reflect the design event (it's not a replacement for (2) above) - the point of which is to "to evaluate the engineering effort that went into the design of the car and how the engineering meets the intent of the market" - this is very different to judging a design in lieu of its designers. To this end, cars that are little-modified can be a real problem - we're supposed to test the design process applied, and often students have no idea of as much with a broadly-inherited design. We end up with something that runs very much contrary to the intent of the competition.

Which is why I'm less interested in the cars getting faster year-on-year - it's not a metric that suggests an improved quality of graduate. If they do get faster, great. If not, not the end of the world.

We also need to be aware that whilst much can be improved on the event side, providing complete closure on a design loop in a year-to-year manner that encompasses prior learning is not the organizer's responsibility. If students can't be stuffed with first principles, evaluating prior efforts or both, that's not the organizer's problem. It simply becomes our job to judge the effort that ends in a delivered design. I'd like to see a criteria added for incorporating prior learnings into design delivery.

I don't agree with the reranking of what's left with performance first, because against the design brief they're all important. A car with a phenomenal performance envelope is, guess what, not likely to have that much explored if it's got crap ergo, and won't last a weekend of whatever it's intended if it can't be readily serviced. Even in F1 these factors are all considered broadly to contribute to having and extracting performance. We can have a more qualitative go at how it's all assessed. FSAE-A 2014 was a case in point: students (perpetual or otherwise) in the competition can say what they want, however not one of the top 3 cars appeared particularly easy to drive. Each had some severe performance deficiencies (yes, even the winner) that simply ranking the entrants against a stopwatch doesn't easily reveal - all that gives is a relative indication of performance on the day. The competition exists to judge a relative performance potential of the student groups involved - not the car on it's own.

I'm a little concerned about giving points for a car that's completed to a high standard. We already automatically take away points for cars not completed to a sufficient standard to get them through the weekend - either they fail scrutineering or something goes terminal over the weekend. Taking Curtain 2014... yes, a very well-finished entrant however I'd be more interested in picking apart their beautifully-finished-but-not-equally-beautifully-executed aerodynamic package as opposed to any review of their fit and finish...

...however were BB's observations made transparent and shared, it could well become a standard.

We need more transparency.

Big Bird

01-15-2015, 11:31 AM

Hi GTS,
I probably didn't explain myself too well. My fingers are like bratwurst at the moment, and i tend to cut my explanations a bit short.
i wasnt so much advocating build quality as a criteria. I just like the idea of a seperate floating feature category that the teams can use to highlight something special they have done. In Curtin's case, i put the build quality under the banner of raceday preparation.
This points allocation could be used to feature, for example:
- component lifing systems
- service manual preparation
- raceday / pit management
- test rig development e.g. tyre testing
- material development
- design for sustainability
- design for manufacture
- team developed manufacturing techniques
- human resource management
- team developed OHS procedures and tracking
Run the presentations as an open session and we all learn something new.

Swiftus

01-15-2015, 12:41 PM

...To this end, cars that are little-modified can be a real problem - we're supposed to test the design process applied, and often students have no idea of as much with a broadly-inherited design. We end up with something that runs very much contrary to the intent of the competition...

You dominate the performance part of the competition with a perfectly figured out car that is evolved since 2010-2011 with nothing really changing besides a bigger aero every year. A lot of judges do really have a problem with that ("They don't know why their car is fast, the "Chris Patton"-generation made the car fast and they are just sticking to it" and so on). I also witnessed a judge in the FSA finals that placed GFR last "because they show up with the same car over and over, that is not the spirit of the competition"...

GTS and Julian - I think it can be very difficult to convey the importance of small design improvements when a judge enters a DE with the mindset of "It must be all new!" This preconception is very difficult to get around when our priorities are not aligned with whichever judge happens to have the disagreeable preconception.

Why must it be all new? There isn't anything in the rules which says it must be all new (except for the 2nd year rules for FSAE-A and Brazil S6.15?). And even in that case, my interpretation from reading that rule was the intent is that the student understands the design process and fundamentals of the previous design if they choose to keep it. I know last year's GFR DE team had a very good understanding of anything that was left 'untouched' from a previous year which ended up on the new car. It is not within our team philosophy to let that happen without good reason. Nearly every component of last year's car was rederived to see if it was still a good idea. If we settled on a very similar concept to a previous year, why should we be faulted?

I bet more than 80% of last year's car was different than the 2013 car. The fact that it remained unseen to the casual observer is not something worth penalizing. Engineering Peacocking is an issue in the DE and it would be nice to see if there is a reasonable way to manage its influence.

GTS - I know you are not interested in cars getting faster year-on-year but it was a major factor in the 5 years from 2009 to 2014. Every year the top and midfield have gotten faster. We can track how much they get faster beyond the accel and skidpad events because we can reference the relative speeds of our new car against the old one. (All of the GFR combustion cars chassis are still in running condition, requiring an engine and ECU to be replaced in the car). If we know our newest car is faster than the old car by some %, and at competition our closest competitor is nearer than that %, bringing back the previous year's car would not result in a win at the competition. The previous year's car would have been slower than the new field of cars.

Some design development had to have been done to move the goalposts, no?

I am a lover of really odd factbits. Ask anyone on our team and they will tell you I know some of the most useless information in the world and am proud of it!

One of my favorites in the automotive world is the development of laminated windshields. Nowadays if a pebble jumps up from under a truck and hits your windshield, it'll crack only one side of the glass and make only a very localized crack. If X-Man Hugh Jackman gets thrown into your windshield at a high speed while in a confrontation with Magneto, the entire sheet of glass may break, but I'll bet it stays in one piece. It'll look like a wonderful blanket of mosaic glass, all shattered and cloth-like.

Windshields didn't start out being so wonderful. They were made of plate glass and shattered at the first sign of trouble. You could get a windshield in 1905, it just was going to break soon after rolling off the showroom floor. By the 20s they were laminating plate glass with a urethane layer in between the panes. This helped keep the entire window together if a pebble were to impact the outside. A larger impact would still shatter the backside and send large shards of shattered glass into the driver's compartment though. By the late 30s they had innovated with tempered glass (useful in WWII planes since it was so much stronger for its weight than plate glass). Tempered glass was the bee knees for 30 years. Then the US Government decided flying glass shards were making a mess of accidents. Culminating with the 'big bumper' rules, a part of the safety push was the mandatory implementation of seat belts and quickly 3 point seat belts (I guess an engineer point out that a body isn't fully constrained by a line, and doing so simply creates a very nice pivot point about a person's waist). They also pushed for better safety glass to be used in windshields. The strength and shatter resistance of the windshields increased greatly in a very small number of years because of this demand.

They have been adding UV protection and glare prevention to windshields since then. No more sun-dried dashboards of the 60s-70s-80s. And I don't know who at GM thought up the blue line at the top of the windshield, but I guess that could be considered a user improvement if not very aesthetically pleasing.

(TLDR) Sorry for the long example, but the point is that windshields have existed for more than 100 years. Nearly as long as cars have been going fast enough to bring tears to the driver's eyes. Is the innovation or engineering design development easy to see or obvious? No. Was there a sweeping change in the implementation of the windshield? In the first 50 years of car development for sure! 2-part windshield and folding windshields and vertical windshields and wrap-around windshields and extremely raked windshields and tinted windshields. These implementation design changes were easy to see and easy to comment on. Eventually everything settled down and the second half of the windshield's story is that of design improvements that go unseen to the casual observer. Better glass, better lamination, additional protections like UV ray protection, incorporation into the aerodynamic design of the vehicle, different mounting techniques. These later design developments are just as magnificent as figuring out that you should simply have a windshield! They just aren't as 'obvious'.

When a design matures, much of the 'fundamentals' become obvious to the design improver and the less 'obvious' advancements they make are what they become proud of. If an observer were to ask the windshield design improver why windshield, then the improver is going to be driven to get through the 'obvious' stuff and take the observer to the non-obvious improvements. The 'obvious' fundamentals are still well known to the improver, but in a time crunch it may be impossible to get past the fundamentals and into the improvements within the allotted time. After this, the observer will walk away from the conversation saying 'Its the same windshield as last year! Psh.'

We did not make it to design finals at FSG. Our car concept looked like the same windshield from last year. However, because of the addition of the UV protection and a better incorporation into the aerodynamic design of the vehicle, our latest windshield was not only the most reliable on track, but it also was the fastest on track.

JulianH

01-15-2015, 01:17 PM

Jay,

yes, the problem is, that design judges are not able to see "your" new windshield.
I only judged GFR in the Austrian Design finals... in aero.. so the area where the most obvious changes happened from 2013 to 2014. Phil was quite good, not the best but yeah, it was good.
So I'm cannot say if it is true that you are basically running your 2011 car with freakin' huge wings.

When I had to guess, then what would help is a new monocoque... You can't tell me that your 2011 solution cannot be topped. There are a lot of monocoques out there that are better than the GFR solution and you are still sticking to it. I understand how much work goes into building new moulds: Zurich is building a brand new monocoque every year. But just this "school of thought" is maybe a point where the judges jump to conclusion: "Ah, they don't change their monocoque of the dominating car of 2011, and the engine is still the same, and the tires are the same... soo what is it?"

And you "lost" the FSA Endurance against an electric car by 1.8seconds, maybe a "GFR wake-up call"? ;) To be honest, I am sure that at the moment your concept is the fastest for a combustion car. TU Munich showed their performance -sadly only in the last quarter of the season- with their brand new concept. So I can understand that you are not going to change your concept "for the sake of changing". The 4WD electric cars are in the same situation right now. They have basically done everything, so the top level concept stays the same.
I don't know how you can't win over "those" judges that go into Desgin thinking "ah those bloody GFR guys". That's the subjective human problem, that Z is always talking about... Maybe Geoff or GTS have an idea...

DMuusers

01-15-2015, 01:31 PM

When I had to guess, then what would help is a new monocoque... "

I think I saw some pictures of a mould a few days ago ;)

DougMilliken

01-15-2015, 01:55 PM

* Break the car into a number of subsections (e.g. chassis, suspension, aero, ergo, etc)
While it isn't easy to define, there is also a need for "integration" -- I've seen a few cars over the years that had reasonable components and yet were obviously crap overall. I gave one team a design review the day after judging and told them their car looked like a lot of science projects bolted together. As we discussed their poor team showing in design, it came out that they lacked a strong/experienced chief designer or chief engineer to coordinate all their individual efforts.

Swiftus

01-15-2015, 02:46 PM

I think I saw some pictures of a mould a few days ago ;)

Yep ;)

https://www.facebook.com/TeamGFR/photos/a.141502269235440.38381.130002227052111/873436719375321/?type=1&theater

Big Bird

01-15-2015, 04:06 PM

Good call regarding integration Doug. I hope within all the other garbage i have scattered all over these forum boards, I have made my views on the need for whole vehicle integration and holistic design pretty clear.

In Oz, we presently have four judging teams, for design management, vehicle dynamics, structural design, and powertrain / electronics. These are broad categories, and the Design Management group's directive is to assess whole vehicle integration and top level design. At least, that is the principle. In review, the event probably looked like a lot of science project assessments bolted together. We need a strong/experienced chief designer or chief engineer to coordinate all the individual efforts. :)

DougMilliken

01-15-2015, 05:49 PM

... We need a strong/experienced chief designer or chief engineer to coordinate all the individual efforts. :)
How do you replace Carroll Smith? It's a serious problem. At the time, my memory is that a number of the "racing industry judges" discussed this but we didn't get very far. Others may chime in, but as I understand it, Carroll really elevated the stature of design judging.

Big Bird

01-15-2015, 06:26 PM

How do you replace Carroll Smith? It's a serious problem. At the time, my memory is that a number of the "racing industry judges" discussed this but we didn't get very far. Others may chime in, but as I understand it, Carroll really elevated the stature of design judging.

Yep, Doug, he was a one-off, and I don't think we would ever find another with all those qualities rolled into one package. I had only one encounter with him, in Oz 2002, and he was already quite ill then. He knew his engineering, but he also had a great empathy for the students, and that is what set him apart. It seemed he was there because he sincerely wanted to help the students - not because he wanted the students to know he was helping them.

Dunno, has anyone approached Ross Brawn?? That was just an idea off the top of my head. Are there others around that people know of who might have similar qualities??

GTS

01-16-2015, 10:07 PM

i wasnt so much advocating build quality as a criteria. I just like the idea of a seperate floating feature category that the teams can use to highlight something special they have done.

This is a good idea.

It'd be excellent to add a rubric or template requiring students to demonstrate a PDCA cycle against any set of the competition objectives for whatever their "something special" is. It'd be great; would be good to install a culture away from 'we were creative but we're not too sure why, we didn't invest in a design process covering why and how we best needed to do this' and 'we built this really cool thing but never got around to validating it, because we thought it'd show in lap times and therefore never did any system performance checking along the way, and then the car was completely unexpectedly first-time-ever-in-FSAE late and we didn't get to test pre comp'.

GTS and Julian - I think it can be very difficult to convey the importance of small design improvements when a judge enters a DE with the mindset of "It must be all new!" This preconception is very difficult to get around when our priorities are not aligned with whichever judge happens to have the disagreeable preconception.

I'm absolutely not advocating that it has to be all-new. I'm simply pointing out that what you've highlighted of your own history -

I know last year's GFR DE team had a very good understanding of anything that was left 'untouched' from a previous year which ended up on the new car. It is not within our team philosophy to let that happen without good reason. Nearly every component of last year's car was rederived to see if it was still a good idea.

- does not happen much at all. If this is what GFR DE does, great. That's proper grounding for industry work and very much in tune with what the competition hopes to instil in students that partake. This is quite far from what happens often, however. I'd be keen to see the difference appraised formally. A change log, have students justify the difference, etc.

We have a few other issues with some teams of 60+ people with a barely-changed package (I don't mean barely-changed concept - I mean a barely-changed design) competing with teams with <10 students and a larger work effort to deliver. Nothing's perfect however we should strive to make the playing field a little more level.

To this end, I'm going to suggest something very contentious: the competition needs a maximum term rule for students. Two years, three years maximum. You register with the SAE and your university, you can only enter a number of times then you're ineligible. This would have good implications through design documentation management, fit within many faculties' learning initiatives, etc. The competition was never intended - and should never be a place for - perpetual students. You know who you are.

I bet more than 80% of last year's car was different than the 2013 car. The fact that it remained unseen to the casual observer is not something worth penalizing. Engineering Peacocking is an issue in the DE and it would be nice to see if there is a reasonable way to manage its influence.

I agree, through judges aren't supposed to be casual observers: as an entrant, you're meant to talk though the 80%. We need to find some ways of making this easier to communicate. I really did like the videos and think a better done version of as much could be super useful, with an eye to capping resources going into it and ensuring that teams can use it for other means too (advertising, sponsorship, university presentations, etc).

GTS - I know you are not interested in cars getting faster year-on-year but it was a major factor in the 5 years from 2009 to 2014... Some design development had to have been done to move the goalposts, no?

I'm not disinterested in the cars getting faster year-on-year; I hope they do in the sense that between (1) the design criteria required to meet the competition objectives, (2) the knowledge freely available to students to deduce what competitive performance figures are, and (3) the wealth of knowledge and example in prior art in the competition, there is no reason that students should not be able to aim for and realise cars that are reasonably quicker year-on-year.

I am completely against, however, the competition being interpreted as being solely about building a quick car, because (1) that's very explicitly not what the competition is about and (2) paying attention to the rest of what it's about lends to an inherently better design, which in turn can allow a greater and more accessible performance envelope and a design process more reflective of the careers students should aspire to. (As in, the people that wrote the rules had a few clues worth following).

We did not make it to design finals at FSG. Our car concept looked like the same windshield from last year. However, because of the addition of the UV protection and a better incorporation into the aerodynamic design of the vehicle, our latest windshield was not only the most reliable on track, but it also was the fastest on track.

This is exactly the point.

I'm not dissuading those that prefer to kaizen the windshield or those hoping to replace it with a force field or a beam axle, simply that you'd better have a solid understanding from a decent design process either way.

That's the subjective human problem, that Z is always talking about... Maybe Geoff or GTS have an idea...

I'd simply suggest that being hellbent on viewing human nature as a problem best replaced with quantitative metrics won't broadly make for successful or otherwise happy individuals in a professional or personal sense. There are very few roles in life that can equitably be undertaken with complete disengagement from subjective factors - certainly not in engineering and not even in racing (which this isn't).

(That's the argument that goes a bit like 'write me an equation for the best way to put that bike around that corner. Excellent. Now go speak to Garry McCoy.')

The best way to decrease variance is to increase sample size; more opinions need to be considered in a structured manner. In short some better process on what goes on behind closed doors post-judging could help. I would stress that for the two competitions I've been involved in, the conversations are very positive and couched in terms of the competitor's best interests.

This is what I like to call Engineering Peacocking and it is definitely something in the real world engineers deal with every day. Usually the best design isn't what gets bought, but instead the design with the best marketing.

Let's not be too quick to confuse presentation with communication. Communication is something engineers need to deal with every day, and something we should not have students shy away from. Engineering is, in part, an exercise in communication: to take qualitative wants and needs, to abstract and delivery a quantitatively-specified solution, and to use both domains to communicate it's competitive worth.

That's part and parcel of engineering. If you don't like it, you're in the wrong industry.

While it isn't easy to define, there is also a need for "integration" -- I've seen a few cars over the years that had reasonable components and yet were obviously crap overall.

+1

It is judged but this is not structured (FSAE-A) in a manner where judgements from other design areas are considered in context with respect to integration.

We can't replace Carroll Smith and shouldn't seek to. We need a better process.

Big Bird

01-17-2015, 05:24 PM

GTS

01-17-2015, 06:32 PM

OK, here I go on another philosophical bent.

My "Reasoning..." thread is all about taking a concept (the FSAE project) and breaking it down into its parts. It is about the design process. The core argument is that you do NOT start with the parts and work backwards.

The FSAE Design Event is about assessing the teams' understandings of design process.

So why do we base our judging process on car parts? We have a composites judge, chassis judge, suspension judge, etc etc

Why not step further back up the process and have judging teams based on the design process:
Problem framing
Concept development and selection
Analysis and validation
Manufacturing and delivery
Performance

It just seems a bit ridiculous to say that this event is so much more than making car parts, but we then judge and allocate scores in categories defined by car parts...

All bents welcome, BB. We are a modern society here at FSAE.com...

I'd suggest we judge by system (in aero we certainly do) not by parts alone, and check/judge for a solid design cycle. Effectively we do as you suggest.

FSAE has always been an exercise in giving rope - some student groups will hang themselves with it, some learn how to fish with it, some build Egyptian pyramids. To this end we give a lot of rope in how students go about design management. It similarly amuses me that some students through faculty in the competition put significant effort in sharing CAD for complete system designs with a view to implementation (and some actual implementation - we used to call this "plagiarism")... when what they should be more interested in is in understanding design management processes that lead to what answer they're seeking. Fishing: not fish.

We could specify, for the sake of clarity, some further parameters to this end in the rubric. I've sated above that PDCA cycle evidence should be shown throughout.

I would be a little wary of seeing 'best answers' copied team-to-team. I'm all for information sharing, less for the process becoming formulaic to the point of being a formality. Thoughts?

01-21-2015, 09:42 PM

DESIGN EVENT - WORTH IT, OR NOT?
=================================
I posted some of my views on this in the Oz-14 Competition thread. I expand on this same theme here.

So far there has been some discussion about the "big-picture" of DE and how to improve it, which is good. But the biggest-picture issue to be discussed when trying to improve anything is "Do we need it AT ALL?". This has been barely touched upon. It needs serious consideration.
~o0o~

To start with an analogy, consider the much beloved Push/PullRods&Rockers of FSAE suspensions. For 25+ years FSAE students have started their year with the question "How are we going to improve our PPR&Rs?". It is only recently that significant numbers of Teams have realised that the best way to make such an improvement is to ... TOSS THEM! For example, at Oz-14 five out of twenty+ Teams did just that, switching to Direct-Acting-Spring-Dampers. They placed 1, 2, 3, ... 5, 6 overall.

Note that DASDs are NOT a big advantage in FSAE, nor are PPR&Rs a big disadvantage (eg. 4th place in Oz-14 went to a Team with virtually NO suspension movement at all, so NO need for either type of spring actuation). Rather, the big advantage of abandoning PPR&Rs most probably came from the LESS TIME WASTED on something that has negligible influence on the car's performance.

Specifically, the quantifiable influence of PPR&Rs on competition points is mostly many small negatives, such as a bit more unwanted mass, compliance, friction, cost, time-to-make, etc., together with no real positives that make the car "faster". But the really BIG NEGATIVE is the amount of TIME that Suspension-Guy wastes designing the PPR&Rs so as to optimise MRs, optimise rising-or-falling-rates, optimise load-paths-to-yet-another-frame-node, and so on.

All this wasted time is a BIG DISTRACTION from building a better car.
~o0o~

Similarly, since shortly after I became aware of this competition (ie. late 1990s) I have been convinced that Design Event is a big distraction to any Team trying to build a better car. It is also a distraction to the education of the students.

DE is undoubtedly a huge distraction to the students, as is evident simply by reading these Forums. Too many students see "winning on the track" as rather hard, so instead they aim to do well in DE. They do so because DE is undoubtedly seen as the MOST PRESTIGIOUS of the Events. The students see DE as the epitome of what "real" Engineers do. By comparison, they see "winning on the track" as too dependent on "chance", or "driver skill", or "having better spanner-monkeys". Which, most students think, is NOT real Engineering.

The overarching goal of most FSAE students is to come out of it with something impressive on their Curricula Vitae. To them "Design Finalist" screams "I am a genius, hire me!" On the other hand, "1st in Enduro, 2nd in Fuel, etc.", just mumbles "I are a good spanner-monkey...".

So, sometime during beginning-of-year Concept Meetings, the students decide to build a "mini-F1" car ... with pure carbotanium PPR&Rs! "Ahhh, yes! The DJs WILL ABSOLUTELY LOVE THAT!!!"

Or, perhaps because their Supervisor keeps stressing KISS, they decide to only build a "mini-F3" car ... with merely billet-machined 6061 Rockers. "Err, well, the DJs will LOVE HOW PRACTICAL we are!"

And, yes indeed, the DJs do love that sort of thing, as has been shown historically ... even though such PPR&Rs are UTTERLY USELESS! Some DJs may claim to encourage KISS, but there have certainly been enough DJs encouraging the above sort of bling over the last 25+ years that the majority of Teams have gone that way. Just look at the cars.

In short, the negative "COST" of DE is that it locks the competition into a loop of "build a mini-F1/F3 car, but try to give it a bit more bling than last year". I am sure that many DJs reading this will disagree. But the historical record shows that the above is, in fact, true. Just look at the cars.

IMPORTANTLY, note that it is possible to build a VERY SIMPLE CAR that is MUCH, MUCH FASTER than anything currently out there. But no sign of this car yet. And certainly NO indication, whatsoever, that DE will lead the students to this car.
~o0o~

The above are the negative "COSTS", but what are the positive "BENEFITS" of DE, if any?

1. One main claimed benefit is that the "design-review feedback of your car" helps produce better educated students. As covered at length elsewhere, this feedback mostly DOES NOT HAPPEN AT ALL, or at most is of a very feeble nature. When good feedback of a Team's efforts is given, it is very often OUTSIDE of the DE proper. And often completely outside of any competition, such as the feedback given to questions and build-blogs on this Forum.

DE is NOT necessary for educational feedback.

2. Another possible benefit is that the DE gives the students an opportunity to practice their "job interview" skills. Or, turning the same thing around, it gives the "Industry Experts", who have "volunteered their valuable time to be DJs", an opportunity to spot talented students who they can employ. Either way, exactly the same results can be had by holding a "Careers Fair" alongside the competition.

DE is NOT necessary for "talent spotting".

3. The only real benefit I see (which makes it a bit left-field) is that the "distraction of DE" teaches the students THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING EASILY DISTRACTED! The students who learn this lesson realise that to do well in the competition overall, they must FOCUS ON FAST CAR, and BLOCK-OUT DE DISTRACTIONS. (As an example, when coaching young Rugby League players I used to make sure they were under maximum distractive pressure when executing critical plays. Things like name-calling, shouting, throwing balls at their heads, etc., worked well... :))

Following this line of thinking, DE could be improved by adding more cunningly deceitful distractions. Perhaps a shiny DE trophy for "Most Spectacular CF Wishbone Failure During Brake-Test". "Yeayyy!!! We've won it three years running!"

This sort of change to DE might be fun, but is NOT necessary.

Much more that can be said, but in summary I see NO GOOD REASONS for having DE. The negative costs outweigh any positive benefits.
~o0o~

What might a competition look like without Design Event?

Let's start with,
"A1.1 Formula SAE Competition Objective
... to conceive, design, fabricate, develop and compete with small, formula style, vehicles...
... [that] should have very high performance in terms of acceleration, braking and handling...
... [and also have good] cost, ergonomics, maintainability, manufacturability, and reliability..."

This was put much more succinctly in past versions of the Rules, but the gist is that the car should be,
1. Cheap to build,
2. Cheap to run,
3. Be very fast on track.
All these objectives are easily measured objectively. Namely, with a stop-watch for the main performance factors, with a calender for reliability, and with a competent beancounter for cost, manufacturability, etc. A specific "Design Event" is not required to evaluate any of these.

So, one option is to simply roll DE into the Cost Event. Currently, the "real cost" of the car is only worth something like 40 points (out of 1,000). Make "real cost" (independently audited, if necessary) worth 200 points, with the other current Cost song-and-dances worth 50 points. Presentation can stay as the main "subjectively judged" event at 75 points.

Or maybe,
Presentation = 100 points, which includes a "The Design of Our Car" song-and-dance,
Cost = 200 points, with "real cost" worth at least 150 points,
Dynamic Events = 700 points, with Fuel ECONOMY worth a full 100 points rather than the currently devalued 40 points.

What would students who want a killer-CV do now?

I see broadly three options.
1. First year, low-budget Team. - Build a really cheap car with super-thrifty engine. That wins 300 points for a start, then right-foot-flat-to-the-floor in Dynamic Events.

2. Established, big-budget Team. - Use mega-power-engine, mega-tyres, and mega-aero, to win ALL those 600 "speed" points, plus slick Presentation for another 100, and be "creative" in Cost.

3. Clever Team. - Build "brown-go-kart-with-aero-undertray" and clean up 900 points (ie. Cost + ALL Dynamic Events). Get "Weird-Guy" to do Presentation.
~o0o~

Summing up, a competition with NO Design Event is ALL about meeting the stated objectives of the competition (ie. A1.1). Any students wanting good CVs have to build a car that is CHEAPER & FASTER THAN EVER. And this is possible for a long time to come yet!

In contrast, for the last ~25 years the students have been trying to "impress the DJs" with their bling PPR&Rs, with their MRs that are spot-on 1:1, with their RCs that "don't migrate hardly at all", and with countless other meaningless drivel. The end result is the same-old EXPENSIVE & SLOW cars, year after year after year...

Oh, and we now have a generation of students who, in too many cases, can't solve simple FBDs or make neat little brackets, so are unlikely to make worthwhile contributions to society in the future.

Z

GTS

01-22-2015, 12:57 AM

Summing up, a competition with NO Design Event is ALL about meeting the stated objectives of the competition (ie. A1.1). Any students wanting good CVs have to build a car that is CHEAPER & FASTER THAN EVER. And this is possible for a long time to come yet!

No disagreement on cheaper and faster (I'd add there's more to it than that); DE is simply about explaining how and why it was done. If your design is solid, the event should be a breeze.

The competition is not a race competition, it is (not the first time this has been explained to you) about students best delivering a complex project in a group environment.

In contrast, for the last ~25 years the students have been trying to "impress the DJs" with their bling PPR&Rs, with their MRs that are spot-on 1:1, with their RCs that "don't migrate hardly at all", and with countless other meaningless drivel. The end result is the same-old EXPENSIVE & SLOW cars, year after year after year...

I'll limit observations to the last 15 years which cover the FSAE-A competitions.

Most students I interact with - including my own experiences as a FSAE student - certainly didn't involve trying to break our backs and the university's patience for a year to impress a few people we'd never met with something that vaguely resembled a race car. The vast majority start out with exactly what you hope for in mind, Z - to build it fast - and go from there.

You seem to underestimate the ability of students given responsibility, build resources, money and the like - but very little accountability - to commit to some fairly ill-thought-out choices in design. Many come to remark ruefully on this in later years. The gap between what was and what could have been... has bugger all to do with design event. Very few teams turned up this year at all prepared for it. Same as last year. Same as every year.

Those that asked for a run through prior to comp didn't stuff up because they hadn't put effort into DE preparation, they stuffed up because they'd made some questionable design decisions that was shown up in their design. They didn't trip up on whims, they tripped up on crap decisions that were reflected in the project. Same as last year, same as every year. I've heard some brilliantly comical design decisions; I was even party to a few myself. The student that massively simplified his engine simulations by assuming air to be incompressible - thus indirectly intending the competition's first three-stroke engine - takes some particular beating. I'm sure everyone's got stories to share.

DE exists to examine the thought. Dynamic events exist to examine the result. It's a not correct to suggest the most brilliant designs are immediately the fastest; this cannot be completely judged on track.

None of this has anything to do with any time spent preparing for Design Event. If the event runs to its' intent and the students to theirs, then good work comes through.

I appreciate that you'd prefer good work to show up on track, but again you overstate the ability of students and underestimate the scope of the work they have to do: there are always gaps because putting together a project capable of being reliably judged in a qualitative environment is intentionally beyond project resources. The cars are never perfect or bulletproof reliable. It'd be wonderful if they were and they're not supposed to be. DE offers another chance to shine.

This is a significant reason to need DE.

I'm sure you'd build a highly-competitive FSAE car, however you're not a student.

Oh, and we now have a generation of students who, in too many cases, can't solve simple FBDs or make neat little brackets, so are unlikely to make worthwhile contributions to society in the future.

Not the fault of the DE.

Too many students see "winning on the track" as rather hard, so instead they aim to do well in DE. They do so because DE is undoubtedly seen as the MOST PRESTIGIOUS of the Events. The students see DE as the epitome of what "real" Engineers do. By comparison, they see "winning on the track" as too dependent on "chance", or "driver skill", or "having better spanner-monkeys". Which, most students think, is NOT real Engineering.

I'd disagree completely - your contention doesn't explain why entrants that do well on dynamic events to compete well in DE too. Many students sadly see DE as 'something they have to do'. Which is often reflected in any critical rigour applied to their actual designs; it's easy to get excited about building something, it's hard work to be critical about doing it well. Students entering the competition to do poorly in dynamic events do not meet the competition objectives, and accordingly do poorly.

You seem particularly hung up on it being a battle between one or the other. It's completely possible to have good DE and dynamic event performance. Many manage it.

You've a particularly low opinion of DE judges. If you think you can do better, volunteer. That's suggested openly/proactively.

Too many students see "winning on the track" as rather hard, so instead they aim to do well in DE. They do so because DE is undoubtedly seen as the MOST PRESTIGIOUS of the Events. The students see DE as the epitome of what "real" Engineers do. By comparison, they see "winning on the track" as too dependent on "chance", or "driver skill", or "having better spanner-monkeys". Which, most students think, is NOT real Engineering.

I'd love to have a careers fair at the event, though it's not what DE is for. It's a nice bit to network through.

IMPORTANTLY, note that it is possible to build a VERY SIMPLE CAR that is MUCH, MUCH FASTER than anything currently out there. But no sign of this car yet. And certainly NO indication, whatsoever, that DE will lead the students to this car.

Agreed wholeheartedly - however you're misplaced in suggesting it's for the DE's to lead it there.

You've been posting for years at significant detail - it'd take people taking what you suggest that seriously to do it.

Not a new problem in education.

Moke

01-22-2015, 02:07 AM

Could part of the answer be as simple as releasing a marking schedule (with comments from section leaders) now-ish, then after the DJ's have a GoToMeeting in October-ish release any changes? This would give students time to see how they will be assessed and prepare for the event.

Judging based on the design processes and systems is a good idea but it is possible to know the process and still have sucky designs. There still needs to be an amount of component level evaluation to assess the successful application of the processes. I like to think of FSAE as a design assignment with a built in bullshit filter that weeds out poor design. We have all seen the great A+ assignment handed in and gone "there is no way that would ever work" but the had a great project log book so here is an A+.

My favourite questions I was asked in design were: "What were your biggest compromises?", "What do you hate, why and how would you change it?", the filpside "What do you love and why?" and "Why is your car better - and not in numbers?". I asked the Auckland guys these each year at their design event practices, and the results are interesting as they often aren't aware of their compromises.

If you dump the design event what checks are there to prevent blind copying of wining designs? A team could see that 5 out of the top 6 teams ran direct acting shocks and decide to just use them since team x does. There would be no need for the team to understand why they might be a better choice or even worse, why they might not be better.

Over a short time innovation will suffer, a few teams will develop a wining design and everyone else will just copy it. Before you know it there will be a paddock of cookie cutter brown go carts and the event will become only a build quality and driver event. The notion of a simple car in the real world has changed and there are a lot of people holding onto the idea that a simple car has no technology from the last 15 years. A basic Hyundai/Mazda/Toyota/etc now comes with ASB, ESP, Air Con, bluetooth, power windows, 50 air bags, keyless entry, etc, so why should FSAE cars not have composite parts, traction control, trick 3d printed parts and the rest. If there is no real points reward for trying something risky or new why bother, just improve what team x uses? FSAE will just become another motorsport event.

Z, you might see being able to justify your design decisions as a distraction from turning a spanner but it is something that will be a distraction throughout their working lives when getting funding or a design approved. Being able to clearly get your ideas across is a very important skill to have and is used in personal and professional life. Being able to make what they design is the difference between a FSAE grad and just another engineering grad. But given less FSAE grads end in up in jobs where they will be making their own design vs jobs where they must get someone else to make it, communication is a part of the job like a doctor needs a good bedside manner.

mech5496

01-22-2015, 02:33 AM

IMO the DE is a way to explain your top-level decisions and the work done to get into detailed component design and integration into a competitive car. It is therefore (to me at least), something like the engineering discussions we all enjoy so much within these forums. Z, when you are describing your "soft-twist" concept or any other concept for that matter, you are basically presenting in a "DE", with people asking questions and arguing being the DJ's. IMO this is really valuable; do not forget that usually there's a strong correlation between DE points and dynamic performance, at least at European competitions. One main flaw I have noted though, is sometimes the background and knowledge field of the DJ's. If you have an e-powertrain DJ that designs electric motors and you have just picked one off-the-shelf, in my experience you are pretty much screwed; you have nothing to present on his field of interest and he might not be that interested on the rest of the powertrain. Another huge problem is lack of understanding/knowledge of the competition rules, limitations and objectives; to add on that, some of the most reasonable DJs we had (and the ones that usually spend lots of time giving feedback) are ex-fsae team members.

GTS

01-22-2015, 04:49 AM

If you dump the design event what checks are there to prevent blind copying of wining designs? A team could see that 5 out of the top 6 teams ran direct acting shocks and decide to just use them since team x does. There would be no need for the team to understand why they might be a better choice or even worse, why they might not be better.

Over a short time innovation will suffer, a few teams will develop a wining design and everyone else will just copy it. Before you know it there will be a paddock of cookie cutter brown go carts and the event will become only a build quality and driver event. The notion of a simple car in the real world has changed and there are a lot of people holding onto the idea that a simple car has no technology from the last 15 years. A basic Hyundai/Mazda/Toyota/etc now comes with ASB, ESP, Air Con, bluetooth, power windows, 50 air bags, keyless entry, etc, so why should FSAE cars not have composite parts, traction control, trick 3d printed parts and the rest. If there is no real points reward for trying something risky or new why bother, just improve what team x uses? FSAE will just become another motorsport event.

Yup. And it ain't motorsport. Never should be, never will be.

Being able to clearly get your ideas across is a very important skill to have and is used in personal and professional life. Being able to make what they design is the difference between a FSAE grad and just another engineering grad. But given less FSAE grads end in up in jobs where they will be making their own design vs jobs where they must get someone else to make it, communication is a part of the job like a doctor needs a good bedside manner.

Correct. Check that earlier word: communication. And it gets far more complex than getting someone to build your vision.

IMO the DE is a way to explain your top-level decisions and the work done to get into detailed component design and integration into a competitive car. It is therefore (to me at least), something like the engineering discussions we all enjoy so much within these forums. Z, when you are describing your "soft-twist" concept or any other concept for that matter, you are basically presenting in a "DE", with people asking questions and arguing being the DJ's. IMO this is really valuable; do not forget that usually there's a strong correlation between DE points and dynamic performance, at least at European competitions.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes, a strong correlation in FSAE-A too.

One main flaw I have noted though, is sometimes the background and knowledge field of the DJ's. If you have an e-powertrain DJ that designs electric motors and you have just picked one off-the-shelf, in my experience you are pretty much screwed; you have nothing to present on his field of interest and he might not be that interested on the rest of the powertrain. Another huge problem is lack of understanding/knowledge of the competition rules, limitations and objectives; to add on that, some of the most reasonable DJs we had (and the ones that usually spend lots of time giving feedback) are ex-fsae team members.

I'd not recommend thinking professional life should be any different - don't ever bet on a perfect audience. Communicate.

Big Bird

01-22-2015, 09:55 AM

Moke

01-22-2015, 12:44 PM

A quick point. FSAE is a uni competition. The types of people who run unis tend to not like motorsport. Would we have a choc wedge's chance in hell of getting uni support for this thing if we got rid of static stuff? It is the DE etc that helps us maintain we are an educational event.

To the University of Auckland and the School of Engineering the design event is the main event they want to win. It is pretty much is the only event that the facility can be a part of it's development, through design event practise and review. Auckland has always seen the Uni as a sponsor, who provides resources such as dynos, machinists, tow car and last year a brand new workshop fit out to the teams requirements (honestly I'm thinking of post grad so I can use it). Right or wrong, universities are ranked worldwide on the basis of their research, so they see the design event as the research part of the comp thus it is important to them.

I used to work for a composite manufacturing company and we would receive at least 2 or 3 sponsorship proposals a month from motorsport teams, they all go straight in the bin. However the company sponsored the Auckland FSAE team, when I asked the owner why he did the reply was "they are not just another racecar, they are an educational project". We also sponsored/helped out a couple of local high schools with projects, but racers always paid full price. I know for a fact this was the case with a large number of other sponsors of the team and why we never had the word 'motorsport' in our sponsorship proposal or even the team name.

GTS

01-22-2015, 02:48 PM

(Unsurprisingly Auckland's design efforts tend to end up with a good car).

Frankly guys this is where the conversation needs to start for FSAE-A. DE as a tool for universities.

There is less automotive relevance for graduates than there ever has been in the region, and competition for the project-based learning / research dollars in various faculties that currently fund FSAE in part are under threat.

Some universities have made a great effort to integrate various parts of FSAE involvement into their curriculum, some have had it as a sort of indirect benefit and there's a spectrum in between and asides, but we need to have an honest chat about how to make it more relevant for universities.

I don't for a second suggest that FSAE is just about automotive grads (though it we treat it as motorsport it's going to have a fairly limited scope). The design project delivery theme is valid in many disciplines as discussed, though a renewed focus how to make it even more relevant to universities would be great.

I've heard suggestions as interesting as adding carbon accounting and requiring the teams have mock ISO 14001 accreditation (just an example - FSAE doesn't deal with any environmental engineering presently, however it's a growing field, and even in automotive a very prescient one). Some have suggested a careers and postgrad fair with the competition.

I know of two universities that very nearly folded their teams this year; the threat is quite real.

01-22-2015, 11:06 PM

Shortish responses, because I am currently in deep PMing with some Teams trying to build CHEAPER & FASTER cars.
~~~o0o~~~

GTS,

This is intended in a positive way, for the betterment of society in general.

You have several times suggested that DE should be worth MORE points than its current 150. How many? 200? 300? More?

You have also given many long posts explaining your views as to the direction that DE could go, or should go.

But, quite honestly, and despite all your words, I have absolutely NO IDEA WHATSOEVER of what students would be expected to say or do in your DE to get a good score out of the now 200, or 300, or more (?) points on offer. I genuinely doubt that most students would know the answer to this either.

More on this below, but I see this increasingly subjective direction of the competition that you are suggesting as a huge obstacle to producing better young Engineers.
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Brent (Moke),

If you dump the design event what checks are there to prevent blind copying of winning designs? (My emphasis.)

Same as now. NONE!

In Canterbury's first year, 2013, they came with a mini-F3 car, a fairly "blind copying" of what they initially thought FSAE was all about. In their second year, 2014, they came with a copy of Monash's 2013 car. For an even better example of "copying", look at Monash's last six (+?) cars... Or GFR's recent cars, and Swiftus's comments on them (page 4)...

COPYING IS FINE, as long as you are clever enough to know WHAT to copy, and how to do it, and when to leave bits out, and when to make tiny changes... But, if you are NOT clever enough to do these things, then you fail on track. (See Canterbury's results...)
~o0o~

Over a short time innovation will suffer, a few teams will develop a wining design and everyone else will just copy it. Before you know it there will be a paddock of cookie cutter brown go carts and the event will become only a build quality and driver event.
...
FSAE will just become another motorsport event.

NO, NO, no, no, no!!! Completely back-to-front!

Sadly, Brent, you are showing your youthful ignorance. Yes, modern motorsport is all about "cookie cutter", boring, spec-cars. But that is only because some witless drones from several generations ago discovered that it is easier to make mega-bucks out of motorsport as (dull) "entertainment" by STAMPING OUT ALL INNOVATION, and instead focussing on the soap-opera techniques of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous", the "Bold and Beautiful", and so on.

But back when "real men" :) designed and drove racecars, there was ALWAYS NON-STOP PROGRESS. This happened because there was nothing like DE acting as an anchor (more below). Read the history books. Or use that google thingy. Try "Can-Am" for some relatively recent history...
~o0o~

... communication is a part of the job ... a doctor needs a good bedside manner.

Piffle! Give me Dr Gregory House anyday! (More below. :))
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Harry,

...the DE ... is therefore (to me at least), something like the engineering discussions we all enjoy so much within these forums...
... One main flaw I have noted though, is sometimes the background and knowledge field of the DJ's.

And therein lies the HUGE OBSTACLE that is DE. As I have said many times before, "EXPERTS" PREVENT PROGRESS.

It is the nature of "progress", or that nowadays overused word "innovation", that only very few people can see the "right direction to go". Quite obviously, if everyone sees it, then it is simply "the standard way of doing things".

It follows that out of any big group of DJs there will only be a tiny minority (possibly none at all) who will recognise that a Team is "heading in the right (but very UNUSUAL) direction", and give them a good score. The majority of other DJs will give that Team a low score "because they couldn't explain themselves". That is, most DJs are stuck in their narrow and deep little ruts and are unable to see out of them, no matter how well things are explained.

This is a very common situation throughout society. In FSAE it currently puts a 150 point hurdle in front of any Teams trying to push the envelope. Maybe a 200, or 300 (?) point high hurdle in future.

DESIGN EVENT IS AN ANCHOR, preventing progress.
~o0o~

... usually there's a strong correlation between DE points and dynamic performance, at least at European competitions.

It was only a few pages ago that Bob was pointing out the exact opposite! Namely, GFR's low DE scores at FSG.

But aside from the GFR/FSG anomalies, a ten year old could look at the Teams and their cars pre-event, pick the ones that are likely to do well in Dynamic Events, and then give a similar DE ranking.

Any "correlation" means squat, IMO.
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Moke (2),

To the University of Auckland and the School of Engineering the design event is the main event they want to win.

I rest my case on that one (ie. hope everyone agrees that DE is a huge "distraction" to many Teams).

I also wonder if the above focus on DE explains Auckland's poor reliability in recent years?
~o0o~

Right or wrong, universities are ranked worldwide on the basis of their research, so they see the design event as the research part of the comp thus it is important to them.

So, hypothetically, if Auckland built a car that metaphorically "smashed the Sound-Barrier" out on track, but if they also did poorly in DE in that comp, then would, or should, the University shut them down because "they have done NO REAL RESEARCH"?

Put another way, who thinks you can build a world-beating FSAE car ... accidentally?
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Repeating one of the above points for emphasis...

COMMUNICATION - The idea that good Engineers must NECESSARILY be good communicators is a load of codswallop.

(And this idea is only gaining traction these days because there is so little need for good Engineering. Because ... TOO MUCH FOOD! :))

EG 1. The only footie on telly these days is soccer (Asian Cup). So, imagine you are one of the Coaches and you have to pick between two possible wingers. One is a wonderful guy, a really great communicator who tells cracking good jokes, but he is a little fat and slow. The other guy can run like the wind, when he strikes the ball it comes of his foot like a rifle bullet, but his "communication skills" amount to almost indecipherable grunting, which only two other players can understand.

The Team has been doing poorly, and you get sacked if they lose again. Who do you pick?
~o0o~

EG 2. You have major health problems. A very nice doctor with wonderful bedside manner has been treating you, but you are rapidly getting worse. A Dr G. House (from the TV show) says "... that nice doctor of yours is an IDIOT, you are a STUPID JERK for listening to him, and ..." he recommends a different treatment.

You hear that Dr H has a very good track record at fixing people, and you cough up your left lung. Who do you pick?
~o0o~

EG 3. Your country is at WAR and it needs better machinery. Or ... "The End". The HR Department has scoured the country for clever Young Engineers. Many of these YEs are exceptionally good communicators, but unfortunately their designs don't work too well, and keep breaking. However, another of these YEs, a rather odd young man, has already produced some exceptionally good, "neverfail", machines, but his explanations of how they work amount to indecipherable grunting.

The enemy is storming the north-wall. You, and the whole country, desperately need a "Machine To Defend North-Wall". Who do you pick?

I could go on (oops, too long already!), but I hope the message is clear.

Z

Big Bird

01-23-2015, 01:43 AM

A bunch of young engineers enrol at university and join their FSAE team. The design task is a difficult one, and everyone comes into the event full of ideas about their own favourite vehicle bits. For the sake of finishing the car, compromises must be made. It can be a frustrating process – but the participants learn valuable lessons about teamwork, communication, and compromise. Some do it well, some don’t. As long as they are willing to put their differences aside for the better good of the team project, they will be better engineers for working through the process.

A bunch of university engineering teams sign up to compete enrol at the annual FSAE event. The competition task is a difficult one, and everyone comes into the event full of ideas about their own favourite vehicle and how they will be competitive at the event. For the sake of finishing the event, compromises must be made. It can be a frustrating process – but the participants learn valuable lessons about teamwork, communication, and compromise. Some do it well, some don’t. As long as they are willing to put their differences aside for the better good of finishing the event, they will be better engineers for working through the process.

A bunch of experienced engineers join an online forum to discuss how to improve the FSAE Design Event. The design task is a difficult one, and everyone comes into the forum full of ideas about their own favourite event improvements. For the sake of delivering the event, compromises must be made. It can be a frustrating process – but the participants learn valuable lessons about teamwork, communication, and compromise. Some do it well, some don’t. As long as they are willing to put their differences aside for the better good of the FSAE project, they will be better engineers for working through the process.

Personally, I like the Design Event. It needs improvement, but we can all learn something from doing it, and we can all learn something by trying to improve it. Just because we haven’t found the right answer yet, doesn’t mean we should just give up on it.

I see design in itself as the key area in which Australia needs to focus. We are good at it. But we don’t communicate this well to the outside world. Redesigning the design event might just be a good little project for our nation – it will help us find the words to describe and identify what good design is…

Moke

01-23-2015, 03:17 AM

Shortish responses, because I am currently in deep PMing with some Teams trying to build CHEAPER & FASTER cars.

Please do let us know who so we can track their rise to the top or will we just know when they blow off design?

Sadly, Brent, you are showing your youthful ignorance. Yes, modern motorsport is all about "cookie cutter", boring, spec-cars. But that is only because some witless drones from several generations ago discovered that it is easier to make mega-bucks out of motorsport as (dull) "entertainment" by STAMPING OUT ALL INNOVATION, and instead focussing on the soap-opera techniques of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous", the "Bold and Beautiful", and so on.

But back when "real men" :) designed and drove racecars, there was ALWAYS NON-STOP PROGRESS. This happened because there was nothing like DE acting as an anchor (more below). Read the history books. Or use that google thingy. Try "Can-Am" for some relatively recent history...

What part of FSAE is not motorsport can you just not grasp? Please can you point me to where the word motorsport is in the rules? I did a word search and found '0' results. However if you would kindly read Article 10: Rules of Conduct below:

ARTICLE 10:RULES OF CONDUCT
D10.1 Competition Objective – A Reminder
The Formula SAE® event is a design engineering competition that requires performance demonstration of vehicles and is NOT a race. Engineering ethics will apply. It is recognized that hundreds of hours of labor have gone into fielding an entry into Formula SAE. It is also recognized that this event is an “engineering educational experience” but that it often times becomes confused with a high stakes race. In the heat of competition, emotions peak and disputes arise. Our officials are trained volunteers and maximum human effort will be made to settle problems in an equitable, professional manner.

DESIGN EVENT IS AN ANCHOR, preventing progress.
I really can't see how having to justify and prove design decisions prevents progress.

... ie. hope everyone agrees that DE is a huge "distraction" to many Teams.

I also wonder if the above focus on DE explains Auckland's poor reliability in recent years?

Pretty sure most would not agree that the design event is a distraction. It would only be a problem to teams that don't understand their design ie: one that copies blindly or uses options on an internet forum to build a car.

And I am 100% sure that a few hours a month spent on design event practice has nothing to do with reliability. If that was the case then we could equally say that team members should be prevented from having friends, family time, root with the mrs/mr or more likely rubbing one out as these are only a distraction from "building a fast racecar". Hey lets get rid of all static events, skid pan, acceleration, autocross and fuel as these are a distraction from all the motorsporting we could be doing, then we will be "real men".

COMMUNICATION - The idea that good Engineers must NECESSARILY be good communicators is a load of codswallop.

Ok, so if you can communicate you ideas effectively you are therefore a shit engineer? If you can show your boss why your bridge won't fall down and another design will, you must be wrong as you must be shit engineer and should not have been distracted by presenting your concept and just built it? You can have both communication skills and good engineering skills.

EG 2. You have major health problems. A very nice doctor with wonderful bedside manner has been treating you, but you are rapidly getting worse. A Dr G. House (from the TV show) says "... that nice doctor of yours is an IDIOT, you are a STUPID JERK for listening to him, and ..." he recommends a different treatment.

You hear that Dr H has a very good track record at fixing people, and you cough up your left lung. Who do you pick?

Your wife just had an emergency C-section when giving birth to your first child which meant a spinal block and thus no working legs after. Middle of the night, the baby is awake and hungry in the bassinet which is out of reach. Buzz the nurse, ask for the baby and get told "no you need to do it yourself", exit nurse, baby still screaming, wife in tears until the room mate gets up and passes over the baby. Next day stitches are bleeding and dressing needs changing same nurse says "so, what do you want me to do, I have other more important things to do."

At the time we thought she was a shit nurse, and so did others that had the same lady. But now I know that she must have been the best nurse in the place since her bedside manner was so ratshit. You do know that House is a TV show right? And if he was a real dr he would have been struck off.

01-24-2015, 10:26 PM

Brent,

... let us know who so we can track their rise to the top...

I get PMs from many students asking many questions. Some are indeed climbing the ladder. Others are held back by their Team-mates and Supervisors.

But what they all have in common is that they have reached a state of desperation where they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel and ask Grumpy-Old-Fart for help. They do so firstly because their teachers are NOT teaching them (Classical Mechanics is so easy, but no school teaches it anymore!!!). And secondly because very little education comes out of DE, or from the DJs (as GTS has said many times, in his opinion "DE is NOT about education").
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

What part of FSAE is not motorsport can you just not grasp?

Three points worth covering here.

1. Back on page 5 you put the argument;

If you dump the design event...
[then] ... innovation will suffer ...
[and] ... FSAE will just become another motorsport event.

My argument is that FSAE is ALREADY JUST LIKE Modern Motorsport.

Both have self-imposed obstacles to progress, or to "innovation" if you prefer that word. The obstacles in MM are the "spec" Rules, and in FSAE they are DE. Which, amongst other hurdles, demands a Design Report that still asks for nonsensical numbers such as the car's "Front and Rear Ride Frequencies" (<- in there last time I looked). These F&RRFs are 19th century nonsense! Keep up with the times FSAE! :(

I then pointed out that whenever there is a TRUE SPIRIT OF COMPETITION, such as the old-time "real racing" I mentioned (with a :)), then there is ALWAYS PROGRESS. Note that in FSAE this "competition" is rightly restricted to being against a stopwatch, not "wheel-to-wheel racing". Interestingly, there are still some preserves of MM where there is still steady progress. Most of these compete against a stopwatch (eg. drag-racing and hill-climb).

I guess I should ask you;
What part of progress do you NOT like?
~o0o~

2. If you took the "... and you get to drive really fast around a racetrack in little "formula" cars, and do other cool "racing" stuff..." OUT of FS/FSAE competitions, then they would ALL crash-and-burn faster than a CF-wishboned FS-car in Brake-Test.

The big attraction of FS/FSAE, over "... you build a toy robot that must escape from a maze", is the "Because Racecar" aura that surrounds it (<- it even has a catchy catchphrase!).

MESS WITH THIS AT YOUR PERIL!

EG. New student, "Oh..., so you don't ACTUALLY get to drive those little racecars anymore? You say it's now all about "communicating" your ideas to some old geezers? Right.....
Now how big and scary are we allowed to make those robot maze-escaper thingies...?"
~o0o~

3. The above EG brings up some interesting questions.

When trying to "improve something" a good tactic is to "extrapolate to extremes". I have extrapolated DE to zero and found that, IMO, it would work very well there.

What about the other direction?

Would a competition with DE worth 1000/1000 points be an "improvement"?
(See above "new student" comment for a hint of my view.)

If DE is considered somehow beneficial to the whole competition, maybe like some herbs and spices in your stew, then what is the "optimal" amount of it? Just a pinch? A bucket full? Add to taste? Whose taste???
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

I really can't see how having to [verbally] justify and prove design decisions prevents progress.

Ever tried putting brains into statues? I've been there, tried it. IT DOESN'T WORK!
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

Ok, so if you can communicate you ideas effectively you are therefore a shit engineer?

Your logical skills are very poor. I suggest googling "Venn diagrams". I will try to explain again in those terms.

Earlier I said,
"The idea that good Engineers must NECESSARILY be good communicators is a load of codswallop."

IMO, the CORE skills required of "good Engineers" are ones that, in FSAE terms, help the students build an objectively "Cheap and Fast car". Namely, skills that help build a car that is very low in real cost, and wins all the Dynamic Events. Pulling words from Rule A1.1, I reckon some of these CORE skills are "an ability to ingeniously ... conceive, design, fabricate, develop and compete ... etc.".

These skills go in the central "good Engineers" area of the Venn diagram.

Now, there are certainly many other Venn diagram areas covering skills that the students may, or may not, have. For example, there are peripheral areas such as "good communicator", "gives great after-dinner speeches", "has an awesome golf-swing", "can whistle all national anthems while juggling AND riding a uni-cycle", and so on.

The important point is that these peripheral skills are NOT NECESSARY to being a "good Engineer". These peripheral Venn areas might be entertaining "added bonuses" to have in Young Engineer, but THEY ARE NOT NECESSARY!!! (<- Do I have to stress this even more?)
~o0o~

The really troubling part of DE is that it nowadays suggests that "good communicator" is a SUFFICIENT condition for "good Engineer". <- NONSENSE!!!

Note that there are precise logical meanings to "necessary" and "sufficient conditions", and they are diffferent. "Necessary" means that YE MUST be a "good communicator" but ALSO MIGHT NEED other skills to qualify as "good Engineer" (and I reckon "gc" is NOT a necessary condition). "Sufficient" is a stronger condition in that it means that YE ONLY needs to be "good communicator" to qualify as a "guaranteed-good Engineer". This, regardless of how crap their car might be!

If you don't believe that DE is like that, then think about how many times you have heard DJs say "We don't care what sort of car the students bring, just that they can DEFEND THEIR DECISIONS in the Design tent."

In other words, these DJs consider "good communicator" to be a "sufficient condition" for "good Engineer".
~~~~~o0o~~~~~

... wife just had an emergency C-section ...

To be very blunt about this, would you rather that the doctors and nurses were very pleasant and friendly, and offered to give a very nice speech about "The Importance of Good Communication and Bedside Manner" AT THE FUNERAL!?

The doctor's job is to fix you on the operating table. Your job, post-op, is to GET OUT OF THERE as soon as possible! I hope you realise that the longer you hang around hospitals, the sooner that you are the central player AT THE FUNERAL!

Coincidentally there was a doco on telly last night about a medical supply company whose artificial hips where falling apart, releasing cobalt, and generally killing their customers. After the product was banned in several countries the company kept selling it as fast as possible in the other countries, but with a policy of "managing perceptions" so as to give a "soft landing".

Clearly, this is the "good communications first, and bugger the core values" attitude that is spreading throughout our societies, and is now well entrenched in DE.

You reap what you sow.

Z

Moke

01-25-2015, 04:15 AM

Both have self-imposed obstacles to progress, or to "innovation" if you prefer that word. The obstacles in MM are the "spec" Rules, and in FSAE they are DE. Which, amongst other hurdles, demands a Design Report that still asks for nonsensical numbers such as the car's "Front and Rear Ride Frequencies" (<- in there last time I looked). These F&RRFs are 19th century nonsense! Keep up with the times FSAE! :(

Saying the design event is an obstacle to progress is incorrect. If a team designs solely for the design event they are making a grave mistake, it is only one part of the overall event. Just like if they designed a car solely for the acceleration event. If there is any part of FSAE that is an obstacle it is the outdated rules as you touch on with the requirements for ride freqs numbers. For example composites are largely misunderstood and have unfair rules against it, such as the side impact testing rules.

Getting the design report up to date and relevant will be a good start towards improving the design event.

What part of progress do you NOT like?
None, I work with some of the most disruptive technologies and companies in the world.

Would a competition with DE worth 1000/1000 points be an "improvement"?
I don't think anyone is suggesting making design 1000 points and you could bet the house it will never be scraped. It is a part of the overall event, which at the moment everyone agrees needs improvement. That is what the point of this discussion is

Your logical skills are very poor. I suggest googling "Venn diagrams". I will try to explain again in those terms.
Nope, they are pretty good.

Here is a Venn diagram as I see it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86972487/Untitled.png

The overall goal of FSAE should be to create better engineers and prepare them for life after FSAE. If they are happy to be just another engineer in the engineering dept then fine but I'm sure most would rather be the lead of that group and to do this you will need to have communication skills along with engineering knowledge.

When I'm hiring engineers I go for the ones in the middle, but that's just me.

To be very blunt about this, would you rather that the doctors and nurses were very pleasant and friendly, and offered to give a very nice speech about "The Importance of Good Communication and Bedside Manner" AT THE FUNERAL!?

I would rather they were good at their job and part of that is dealing with people. The nurse had a shit bedside manner and was also shit at her job - newborns need feeding and bleeding stitches are a bad thing. The next nurse was nice, helpful, explained what was going on and could do the basics of her job - she was a good nurse. We had a doctor who also explained what was going on and got the baby out alive - he was a good doctor. It is not a case of one or the other, you can have the technical skills and communication skills. And as soon as we could we got out of there.

JulianH

01-26-2015, 04:18 PM

I think this discussion is far away from any "real" impact on the competition.

Even if "the old boys club of FSAE forums" would agree to get rid of the DE, this never going to happen.
Geoff et al. gave the most important aspect: universities will never support the competition without the Design Event / Statics.

So the discussion has to be: How can we improve the statics of FSAE?

In my opinion ALL statics have a lot of flaws:
Business is a big problem: You win with a nice presentation. Content is not really important. Yes, I know the scoring sheet says something different. But judges are flashed by nice presentations. At FSG 2013, Zwickau won with a concept of "Speed Dating". So you meet you partner for life, drive the car and fall in love.. I mean, that's creative yes and the presentation was perfect, so they won those areas. But that's so far away from "real life" and even from "real life FSAE" that I think it does not help anyone.

Cost is a big problem: You don't win with the cheapest car, you win with a neat report (and to know how to cheat)... At FSG 2014, two of the most expensive FSAE cars of all time (Zurich's and Stuttgart's electric cars) placed 4th and 2nd.
Problem is, if you give like 200 points for "real cost", the incentive to cheat is incredibly high! The work load for Cost judges is immense. So you cheat like 50 times and get caught 3-4 times -> Great reduction in price and only a few penalty points.
So yes, Z is right: We need a measure to make sure that the cars are cheap. But the Cost tables and the cost report at the moment are not able to estimate the REAL cost of a car.

At the moment, at least in Europe, the top teams say "screw it, we will make the fastest car possible, we don't care about Cost". YES, this is against the famous A1.2(?) rule of a cheap weekend racer car. But this design choice gets the most points. So of course everybody is doing it if they plan to compete for Top3.

And yes, we covered the problems in Design...

bob.paasch

01-26-2015, 05:34 PM

A bunch of experienced engineers join an online forum to discuss how to improve the FSAE Design Event. The design task is a difficult one, and everyone comes into the forum full of ideas about their own favourite event improvements. For the sake of delivering the event, compromises must be made. It can be a frustrating process – but the participants learn valuable lessons about teamwork, communication, and compromise. Some do it well, some don’t. As long as they are willing to put their differences aside for the better good of the FSAE project, they will be better engineers for working through the process.

Personally, I like the Design Event. It needs improvement, but we can all learn something from doing it, and we can all learn something by trying to improve it. Just because we haven’t found the right answer yet, doesn’t mean we should just give up on it.

I see design in itself as the key area in which Australia needs to focus. We are good at it. But we don’t communicate this well to the outside world. Redesigning the design event might just be a good little project for our nation – it will help us find the words to describe and identify what good design is…

Geoff, I like your attitude. The Design Event needs some fresh thinking.

The students teams design and build a new car every year. The better teams also apply continuous improvement practices to their design, manufacturing, testing and business processes. Why would the competition organizers not do the same? IMHO, FSAE here in the US got complacent, with an attitude "it's not broke, so don't fix it". There's new leadership now, and that attitude is slowly changing. Like it or not, the competitions have competition. The teams can vote with their feet and their money, attending the competitions that are well run, and shunning those that are not.

Big Bird

01-26-2015, 10:33 PM

I have to say that I am getting pretty bloody tired of the tit-for-tat arguments that are degrading this forum. I repeat. We are all fighting for the same cause. I know each of the protagonists in the above arguments, and you ARE all in agreement about the intent of the comp, the quality of engineering education in this part of the world, and even many of your ideas of how to improve FSAE. FFS, stop this bullshit arguing and poring over points of order and stand above this destructive nonsense. In particular, those engaged in these silly "Z vs the world" arguments, your antagonism is doing more harm than good. We have reduced a much needed discussion to a name-calling exercise.

GTS, I have full respect for what you are trying to do by giving a judges point of view. It is well needed given the lack of real feedback we have been getting from event judges. But your headline about paranoia is plain offensive and low, and has dragged this debate into the gutter. Take it down.

I am not interested in who said what to who, I am not interested in picking apart someone’s post and quoting the words used in the fourth line of the third paragraph of someone’s post from two pages back. I could not give a fat rat's clacker how you justify your latest minor revision of your argument, or how desperately important it is that we all know that the answer is "red" whilst that other fool is arguing it is "crimson". No matter who you are, what your history is, whether you are a competitor or alumnus or a judge or an official or a marshal or a spectator or an F1 designer or a former competitor's uncle's greengrocer - if you feel the need to post out of spite or to defend your honour or to set someone straight - then you should probably take a Bex and lie down for a while.

No-one wins when we start getting personal.

I am here because I know the FSAE program is the best damn thing that happened to me during university, and was the only bloody thing I did at university that taught me anything about engineering. In my country the event is so close to imploding it is not funny, and it pains me greatly that future engineering students will not get the opportunity I did. And yet in the face of such crisis, we are playing silly little power games, and attacking personalities rather than discussing ideas.

And that is the point. This forum, when it works, is a competition of ideas. As is FSAE. It is a meritocracy. But I have seen both these forum boards and the event itself degrade into ego driven political bun-fighting. It is childish, it is petulant, and it is killing our event.

If you have an idea, offer it. If it is good, it will float. If it is not, it will sink. Your idea does not become better by restating it over and over, and it does not become a better idea by belittling people who have an alternative idea. It is time to stand above the petty name-calling and spitefulness. It is time to stop the silly arguing and tantrums and carefully worded slights undermining your perceived foes. If you can’t bring a bit of goodwill, humility and collaboration to the table – then FFS please inflict your harm elsewhere.

And no, I do NOT accept bullshit cop out arguments that this is the way things are done in industry. If industry is as unprofessional as this, then we will just do better.

My respect will go to those who can stand above the bickering and redirect their energies to something constructive
My respect will go to those who can recognize where they have erred, and are not too precious to apologize
My respect will go to those who can find the ways in which we agree, rather than disagree
My respect will go to those who can prove to us they are here for the betterment of the FSAE experience

My comments on static event improvements will follow.

Big Bird

01-27-2015, 12:36 AM

Julian, thanks for your considered thoughts on the Static Events. Fully, fully agreed. Whilst the concept of the Static Event program is generally good, I think the application in flawed.

The concept of FSAE is to expose students to all aspects of an engineering project – it is meant to be an experience in rounding out an engineer’s education. However in practice we find the following issues:
- Inequitable distribution of tasks. In most teams, the preparation of the Cost Report and the Business presentation are left to a few overdedicated souls while the bulk of the team focus on building racing cars. (I know this as I was the poor sucker at RMIT who did Cost Report and Business presentation for about 4 years). Thus the learnings are not distributed throughout the team.
- Similarly in the Design Event, the best students are picked out to present the car and the team’s design knowledge, while a lot of the team are left in the background.
- Unwieldy reports – we make the teams prepare these enormous Cost reports, and then they are too big to accurately assess. What’s more, the cost reports tend to be done by maybe 2-3 team members. Thus, we have 2-3 people repeating the same process over and over and over – for hundreds of parts on the car. They learn about the process of costing, but then they do it again and again and again. The students don’t get any value out of doing it for more than say, 5-10 parts. But by extending it to the whole car, they just get sick and bored with it, and the end result is a report too big for the cost judges to accurately assess.
- Inequitable vehicle costs – as per Julian’s comment above. Cost report cheating / manipulation. Who really benefits from that?

So my ideas:

Vehicle Cost:
Up-front concept based vehicle costing. The SAE publishes a set of vehicle costs based on vehicle sub-systems. If your chassis is steel, its cost report cost is $X. If a carbon tub, it is worth $Y. A double wishbone suspension system is worth $A per corner. A beam axle is worth $B an end. If you have an electric car with 4 hub motors, your cost is $D per driving motor. Each brake system is costed per caliper/disc set. We allocate costs for all major vehicle systems (engine, diff/driveline, suspension, braking, chassis, etc), and once you have picked your vehicle concept (eg carbon tub with wings, a-arms, 4 cyl 600 and 13” wheels), your cost is known. None of this bollocksing around hiding costs of bolts and rod ends and stuff. If your car has an A-arm corner, then that corner is worth, say, $500 - bolts and nuts and rod ends and a-arms and all. The idea of this is that you can work through your design tradeoffs up front as your vehicle competition cost will be known as soon as the concept is proposed.

The difference to what we have now is that we have costing based on components. Thus the competition cost is calculated and assessed over hundreds of items. Far too much scope for cheating. If we base the competition cost on say, 10-15 major components or systems of known published costings, policing of competition cost becomes much simpler and more transparent.

As for costing the individual components, (still a valuable professional skill), we seperate that from the competition cost of the whole car. A good outcome for a team is that a number of students are engaged in the process, and that they do it well. So we reward teams that have programmes that engage a good number of students, and who all have knowledge of costing of manufacture.

So we break the car into nominated systems, with say 5-10 connected parts per system. 15-20 students are nominated as the team’s cost report competitors and each of them has to complete a roughly 5 page costing report on one of the nominated systems. Maybe 2-3 are picked out at random, and these students are then interviewed and assessed at the event.

The cost report score is the number of reports submitted (say, up to 20), multiplied by a quality factor determined by assessment of the 2-3 randomly picked out reports.
Justifications:
- We want more than 2-3 students learning from the exercise. A good outcome is that we have say 20 students per team benefitting from the event. The score linked to number of reports submitted encourages more involvement
- We want to encourage collaboration and mentoring within the teams. Picking reports at random puts teams at risk of losing points if not everyone is up to the same standard. Thus, it is not in the teams best interests to submit any sub standard reports
- Cost judges no longer have 200 page reports to scan over – they have maybe 10-20 pages per team, which enables tighter scrutiny and more accurate scoring.

I’ll get onto the Presentation Event later. I’ve written enough for now…

Big Bird

01-27-2015, 01:54 AM

GTS, firstly, if there was any implication that anything more than the second paragraph was specifically aimed at you, then I apologize. I changed the order of some of the paragraphs and can see that you might have thought the third one was directly targeted at you as well. It was not.
If there was some belief that I am defending Z, I am not. My post was aimed at ALL involved in this tit for tat. I have written to Z privately on this issue, and am considering how I might proceed further. Yes, I recognize that you had offered to meet to resolve this, I was pleased to see the olive branch offered and I was considering how we might arrange this.
My point is that we must STOP THE BICKERING. We are ALL engaged in this. It is damaging to us all.
As someone who is battling a neurological condition, I know the damage that can be caused when mental instability is insinuated. That sort of stuff sticks. I do not care if it is Z, or whether it was aimed at you, or me. That sort of stuff does not belong on this forum.
Most of your argument is exactly my argument, and it is quite odd that the whole point of my argument is being used against me. Yes, it is a volunteer run event. I know that as well as anyone. And I am giving as much time and energy as anyone volunteering and mentoring teams and the like. But crying self-righteousness about all we are giving will not mean a jot if the core product is flawed. And, speaking of our Australian event, it is. And we ain’t going to find a solution if we sit around arguing who is a fool and who is a sacred cow.
Our country is becoming increasingly irrelevant because we are too bloody precious. Our culture is increasingly focussing on pointing out others flaws, and protecting our own little piece of turf by pointing to the faults of others. We have an ineffectual government that spends its time opposing its opposition. And here on these boards, we are doing no better.
So, resolution. Wangaratta. I nominate Labour Day weekend. I will supply venue, food, and accommodation. Agenda – resolution of these arguments, and building collaboration. GTS, Z, I expect you both there. Complaints about the date can be appended with a better alternative.

GTS

01-27-2015, 02:21 AM

Thank you Geoff. Comment removed.

I posted what I did because I think it fair to note when a contribution is so OT that it can't represent the best interests of anyone directly involved. It's a thread on improving design event, not on debating the merits of having it at all. It's about how to make it better whilst acknowledging what resources and constraints there reasonably are, not about deriding volunteer efforts at large. There is very little time to gather low-hanging fruit for 2015 FSAE-A, wrap it into a rule addendum and pack it on it's way. There is a short amount of time beyond this to find relevance for an industry outlook that'll change irreversibly in 2018, for parity efforts with overseas competitions, for sponsorship, for making life easier for EV entrants, for a lot of necessary things.

It breaks my heart to speak with faculty and hear 'this is probably the last year we'll be supporting Formula SAE'. From teams that won competitions, or were even instrumental in getting the event back to Australia way back when. Remember when Australian industry made, dollar-for-dollar, the best cars in the world? (Sorry rest of world but we'll insist it's true.) Times are changing and the competition must adapt. DE is the most transferable element of the entire competition. Some universities like cheap and fast racing, and do Formula Vee/Ford/E30 racing/time trials/etc. The majority do FSAE, precisely because it offers what it does. Making the static events better is important, and I'm all for robust discussion here. Let's be honest though - the disucssion needs to stay here. Not on getting rid of things. Let's just keep it OT without indiscrminately slagging off those that volunteer time and skill to make the event possible. It's not hard.

Probably a good opportunity to stress, again, that not all the change needs to come from the organisers either. Sharing of resources, open sourcing of various project elements, organising open mic nights, document repositories, you name it... there's so much you can all organise among each other to help this much, there are very many alumni that can help with resources to make it easier to get more out of, and put more into, your design management, FSAE experience and legacy. Please don't leave it all up to us (where 'us' is 'not the students'). There is only so much we can do, and this is your time. Be creative in making the most of it.

To Wangaratta.

Mitchell

01-27-2015, 07:23 AM

So, resolution. Wangaratta. I nominate Labour Day weekend. I will supply venue, food, and accommodation. Agenda – resolution of these arguments, and building collaboration. GTS, Z, I expect you both there. Complaints about the date can be appended with a better alternative.

I am sure there would be a few teams, both local and interstate, that would be willing to send representatives if this were to become an event. I imagine a "Design Design Event to Win". Add some structure and aim to have a draft proposal organised?

JulianH

01-27-2015, 11:44 AM

I'm with Jay here.
Counting bolts and "number of steps to mount part A to part B" are quite useless points.

Maybe we can go to a concept like the "old" sustainability report at FS UK:
You insert the weight, the material and the manufacturing process (casting, milling 3-axis, milling 5-axis, laser cutting, prepreg, vacuum infusion...) of the most important parts and it gives you a number -rounded to the nearest dollar- for this part. I don't care about "what 1000 cars would cost". Nobody is building 1000 race cars a year...

If this process can be monitored, the cheating could be reduced. It could be difficult if a team is stating "our uprights way 150g" but then they probably have to weigh in this part after the competition and get a substantial penalty if the weight is outside a +- x% zone.

I think we have to reduce Cost to a top-level approach and then we can start "awarding" teams that are trying to build a cheap car.

Tim.Wright

01-27-2015, 02:01 PM

I've never liked the idea that cost and design are assessed independently...

In the real world assessing the quality of an "engineering" job is the simultaneous assessment of design, cost, materials and processing. Design features such as rod ends in bending, single shear upright mounts, control arms loaded in bending, trade-off in suspension kinematics can ALL be validly justified when you take cost, materials and processing into account. They might be bad/inefficient designs, but if they make a significant cost saving, then they are solid "engineering" choices.

Conversely, I think that "engineering" points should be subtracted where designs are unnecessarily expensive or where an extra cost has been incurred, but no performance advantage demonstrated. An example could be a complicated rapid prototyped upright which is not lighter, or stiffer than a machined alternative. It should be marked down in design for obvious reasons, but I think it deserves a double hit for not properly considering the cost and processing.

In the end though, the overall assessment still needs to be performance biased. A flawlessly executed 120kg full composite machine with a 75kW custom drive train which can pull 2G in cornering should rightly be assessed as better than a well designed 150kg steel brown go-kart making 70kw from a well sourced commercial motor that can corner at 1.8g even if the performance/cost is much lower on the first example.

JulianH

01-27-2015, 03:39 PM

One problem with Cost is Sponsoring in my opinion:

Sponsoring screws up the typical "Cost vs. Performance Tradeoff" of a typical engineering decision.

Two examples: The motors that are developed by Zurich are incredibly expensive. But we got them for free. Nobody would pass on the best motors in the competition just because you "normally" would not use them.
Another one is Selective Laser Melting... some teams have an institute or a sponsor doing those things to get maybe an upright or what ever at some less weight. For free obviously. If you don't have access to such things, you would use another method / other materials because it would be a better trade-off for Cost/Performance.

To exaggerate: It could be possible that a team can use SLM uprights for free but would have to pay for milling/welding. What now?

I think it would be difficult to assess those areas in a "combined Cost&Design" event.

GTS

01-27-2015, 07:15 PM

Julian

It should be costed as the Design Brief: a car for a small production run. Let's not confuse production intent and prototype costs here.

It should also be designed as per the brief - if you're running unobtanium that has no place on a production example, you're doing it wrong. Unless you can prove that it can be produced readily and meet the design brief.

Teams should happily pass on anything not meeting design intent, as it's irrelevant to the design brief. This should be better policed. Similarly, if a team can prove something new and relevant can actually be made on cost for quantity, so be it.

What a team pays or doesn't to make prototypes is exclusive of the Cost Event. You don't cost a production BoM on what your first prototype actually cost.

There are competitions that allow complete freedom in cost-no-object prototyping (e.g. solar car racing); FSAE isn't and shouldn't be one of them.

bob.paasch

01-27-2015, 07:35 PM

One problem with Cost is Sponsoring in my opinion:

Sponsoring screws up the typical "Cost vs. Performance Tradeoff" of a typical engineering decision.

In a way, the same can be said for "Education". GFR uses a carbon-fiber monocoque chassis for our cars for several reasons, but the most important reason is our students want to learn carbon-fiber monocoque design and manufacturing techniques, and companies want to hire these students because of their knowledge. The decision process is customer driven, our customers (the students and companies that hire them) want this (customer needs) and we give it to them.

Big Bird

01-27-2015, 08:02 PM

To be honest I think this is one of the key areas where our choice of static event judges needs to be very carefully monitored. And it is one of the main reasons I push for alumni to take up judging roles in this event. It is with the informed alumni that I have the most sophisticated discussions about the merit of a particular design with respect to:
- the resources available to the team
- the goals and objectives of the team
I am not one who believes that if the team has limited resources, then it needs to go out and get more resources. Good design can occur within the confines of limited resources, just as much as poor design can be found in teams with extensive resources.
The merit of design is in delivery of functional requirements within the bounds of the resources available. Sure, there is some scope to trade/invest some resources (e.g. project time) for others (e.g. sponsorship dollars), but in the end you have to put a cap on it somewhere. And to this point in time I have had more rounded discussions with alumni on this matter than outside industry professionals.
I don't believe that a solely alumni based judging crew is the answer - we need balance and outside perspective. But an industry monoculture is just as bad as an alumni monoculture. As is an incumbent monoculture, where the existing crew assume that outsiders are less informed than they are - is less desirable again.
And before I offend anybody again - I am not taking pot shots at anyone here!

Big Bird

01-27-2015, 08:05 PM

GTS

01-28-2015, 12:23 AM

And sorry, I missed the main point I intended to make.
FSAE is great because it offers the scope to cater to the top end of town (e.g. composites training and research) right through to the lowbudget end of the scale. We DO NOT want to lose this.

We don't have to within reason (RMIT was in a similar position in 2004 - have autoclave and great aerospace project, an olympic project win, want composites in car).

The nice thing about FSAE is that you can run some stuff that's relatively more expensive within the intent of the rules, you simply need to compromise elsewhere. Pick your compromises and move forwards. It's policed poorly, though the intent of the competition was setup to very broadly decouple resource constraints from performance envelopes. We have too many entrants and alumni confusing what it cost to build a prototype with what it costs to build a production example in series.

I would prefer to expand the remit of the cost event slightly to allow teams to explain with substantiation - where they believe it appropriate - what they'd have done with more resources in prototype, and what this would have meant in performance. Designing better is free.

If a university wants, for instance, a project that runs best composites, electric motors and energy storage... it looks more like a recipe for a solar car entry.

FSAE doesn't need to be, and shouldn't be, all things to all schools.

GTS

01-28-2015, 02:29 AM

Moke

01-28-2015, 04:23 AM

Just a quick comment on the composites is expensive topic, I just got a price for work from a Chinese carbon fibre producer - US$15/m2 for 200gsm cloth, US$8 for 200gsm Uni and that is just for one roll, there are discounts for more than 2 rolls. At my old job our moulds could produce about 600 parts before they needed replacing, so the cost of moulds per part worked out to be about $10 per part.

This is an area where the competition/marking/cost is lagging behind the realities of modern manufacturing.

This is my ideas for improvements:
Design -
First up, keep it. Then release the marking schedule early. Have a Goto meeting of the judges and re-release the updated schedule afterwards. This would show the teams the areas that they will be assessed on and thus they can prepare accordingly. And teams need to prepare for the event.

It sounds like the at comp event is about right except maybe, if time allows, space out the 'appointments' to give the judges time to write up their notes. It is after the event that improvements are needed. Release the judges notes at the same time as the results. If a judge is able to spare the time they could host a short (15-30min) review, not debate, at the teams request. Those Dj's that can't hang around could offer up an email or goto time to have a review with teams at a later time.

JulianH

01-28-2015, 06:09 AM

Swiftus, no issues with anything you've written. Most universities have core research and commercialisation competencies they'd like reflected in various programs. That's totally OK.

Just do it within the confines of the competition intent. Having limits to execution is not a limitation to what's developed. If AMZ wants to run a batshit EV power train, that's fine, as long as they're competing fairly on cost and design intent. There's no limitation in the rules on how many ways you can skin a cat.

Just respect what's there for parity. Show you batshit crazy electric motors can be made in series and at a cost that keeps your car viable, or show that you made compromises elsewhere or both. It's about choosing poisons/compromises/integration/etc.

FSAE shouldn't become a place where biggest spend dictates. This is different. If universities really want that, there really is solar racing and a bunch of other exercises.

GTS,

what I meant is exactly contrary. It is NOT a big amount spent. It is none spent. It's free. But still expensive for the sponsor.
The university is as far away from FSAE as a university can be. They put a nice picture of the car on their homepage if we won or when we set the World Record, but that's it.

They don't say "Oh you have to use the expensive stuff, to make it look cool". They simply don't care at all - as long as the project is run safe and educates the students.

What my point was:
Yes, it is a prototype and all those cars probably need some tweaks for mass production.
Our motors were too expensive for selling the car - yes. But we paid 0$ for them. Getting the AMKs (argueably the best "buy option" for electric drivetrain) would have costed us a 5-figure Euro amount (and that was back in the day when the Euro was 1,5 times the Swiss Franc/Dollar...). They could be mass produced but seriously, why would you pay a significant amount of your total budget for that if you get it for free.

In my opinion, this is project managing as well and therefore part of the competition.

You are right that the students should be able to justify their choice.
Maybe we have to introduce a category: "What would you change from prototype (which is a showcase of your "company" and what you are capable of doing) to the mass product? And what would be the influence in "real" cost and "real" performance?"

In the end, there are always going to be teams going for the fastest car.. The question is, if we can make the penalty in such a Cost&Design event so harsh that "really" the best compromise is going to win.
If GFR/Zurich/Delft/Stuttgart give you 5-6 seconds on a one minute lap, you have to make up a lot of static points to beat them.

GTS

01-28-2015, 08:17 PM

The university is as far away from FSAE as a university can be.

Not an ideal situation.

Yes, it is a prototype and all those cars probably need some tweaks for mass production.
Our motors were too expensive for selling the car - yes.

Then you're operating outside the spirit of the competition, and you shouldn't be using them. Teams are to build a production prototype. If you're motors are too expensive, you're using the wrong motors, period.

But we paid 0$ for them. Getting the AMKs (argueably the best "buy option" for electric drivetrain) would have costed us a 5-figure Euro amount (and that was back in the day when the Euro was 1,5 times the Swiss Franc/Dollar...). They could be mass produced but seriously, why would you pay a significant amount of your total budget for that if you get it for free..

We're confusing production BoM costs - what teams are judged on - with project build costs.

In my opinion, this is project managing as well and therefore part of the competition..

Teams are not assessed on internal finances.

You are right that the students should be able to justify their choice.
Maybe we have to introduce a category: "What would you change from prototype (which is a showcase of your "company" and what you are capable of doing) to the mass product? And what would be the influence in "real" cost and "real" performance?"

I think this would be a great approach.

In the end, there are always going to be teams going for the fastest car..

Sure, but if this is all they're going for then they're in the wrong competition - they're going to be disappointed.

I would suggest that (at least in Australia) that none among the fastest are perfect cars.

The question is, if we can make the penalty in such a Cost&Design event so harsh that "really" the best compromise is going to win.

That's the idea of the competition, however there's sufficient space to improve cars at less cost yet.

If GFR/Zurich/Delft/Stuttgart give you 5-6 seconds on a one minute lap, you have to make up a lot of static points to beat them.

Possibly so.

GTS

01-29-2015, 12:15 AM

Swiftus the key words are design decisions.

Team can decide to do whatever they wish to do within the rules set. They simply decide what goes in, why, and why the consequences of their decisions are better than what they didn't decide to do. This is done from a number of perspectives: cost, performance, you name it.

If there are parts in the car that cannot be replicated on cost in a production context, you're outside the rules - simple. Had this very dilemma way back when it was my FSAE year too. Not a new problem.

Maybe we are talking the same argument.

mech5496

01-29-2015, 05:38 AM

Maybe we have to introduce a category: "What would you change from prototype (which is a showcase of your "company" and what you are capable of doing) to the mass product? And what would be the influence in "real" cost and "real" performance?"

Julian, as you know, this is partially implemented on EU competitions (or at least some of them) as part of the "real case scenario" in the cost event.

Regarding cost of e-motors, currently is per kW, but there isn't any guidelines whether this is per nominal or max values. I bet you that all e-teams cost their motors per nominal values, which for FSAE are pretty irrelevant. Moreover, with the current rule set, 4x20kW motors would cost the same with 1x80kW; this is simply not realistic. Actually the single motor team might come up more expensive due to the (needed) differential.

GTS

01-29-2015, 06:44 AM

I think my point really is that teams shouldn't be unable to use unobtanium in their cars. They just have to defend the design choice to use unobtainium in the 3 arenas where it counts in FS, in design, in cost, and on track. If they think the losses in two of the arenas are worth the gain in the third, who are you to force them not to have that design option?

You're picking at two issues here. I've addressed both.

1
Teams can truly use what they want. Everything bears a compromise on something else.

2
This needs to be practically limited by the notion that the metrics we use for assessing these tradeoffs can't be a full-on pisstake.

I really don't care what students are offered by sponsors. Students could be offered cells with thirteen times the density of the best Saft can offer made from laser-sintered titanium-infused ostrich scrotum with dilithium electrodes for all I care. Read S4.1 and S4.7 very carefully. Unless sponsors plan on giving 1,000 units a year at a production price reflecting the competition intent, a team so affected is outside the spirit of the rules. There's not much else to it.

That is not 'forcing students not to have that design option', that's asking competitors to set themselves reasonable design challenges that are fair to all competitors. If students can demonstrate, working with their sponsors, that e.g. the aforementioned laser-sintered titanium-infused ostrich scrotum parts could actually be costed reasonably within the scope of the rules, great. Demonstrate it.

I think the way the rules and points are formatted right now, the interpretation that unobtanium is 'against the spirit of the rules' is a fallacy. If that were the case, cost and design would be 2/3 of the competition and not the dynamic events.

33% doesn't make for a fallacy, Jay.

Teams without access to similar resources might think your assertion differently, particularly when the end of their year at competition ends with the rules not capturing resource differences equitably. This is an area the event can improve in.

Every part on every one of these cars could be replicated on some level of cost in a production context...

All the event needs to ask is that people can prove it beyond anecdotal statements. We have real issues in the EV section presently.

I think all materials and methods have their place in this world and it should be left up to the students to defend their choices.

Within reason, sure.

A defeating part of this competition is the pre-conception of what an FSAE car should be by many of the 'alumni' of the competition (DJs and former students are all 'alumni' IMO).

Sorry mate, can't agree with you there. Many of us have zero preconceptions about what the car should be. Appreciably it's not replicated by everyone still on these forums, however many alumni do actually move on with life. We're more interested in students' thoughts and processes.

What is the real goal of the event? I think it will be agreed that the intent is not to simply make a race car. The intent is to teach budding students lessons which cannot be learned in the classroom and often take too long or carry too many consequences to learn at an internship. Lessons of teamwork, cooperation, time management, scope control, design process and design application, hands-on manufacturing and etc. are probably the agreed upon true intents of why FSAE was founded. 'Alumni' were tired of getting green and awkward engineers out of colleges and had to waste 6 months and the fate of a minor project on getting the whippersnappers whipped into productive shape.

Can that generalized intent be counted as accurate?

It's best said here http://students.sae.org/cds/formulaseries/about.htm

If so, then why force further constraint of the design decisions? 180 pages of rules (not counting the pages in the SES, IA, BLC, FMEAs, etc) already takes a fresh student on our team close to a month to really truly understand the limits of what is possible. Adding more will just make that process take longer.

Who said it's further constraint? Or any addition to the rules? Nothing of the sort, Jay. Simply suggesting students not take the piss on it, that's all.

A month of RTFM before being let loose with other people's money with so little experience on so little accountability isn't time lost, I'd argue it's quite quick.

A disagreement in a design decision should be made during the design event after having listened to the defense delivered by the students who created the design. If it is safe, and meets the performance objectives of the team while still maintaining a deliverable of a 'car for a weekend racer', then it is a valid design. Your judging score can be used to rank its validity.

Same goes for cost. If the team ends up with a million dollar FS car, they will be penalized in cost. Hopefully they can make up for that in added performance on track. But if they can defend the additional cost-to-performance ratio in the design event, shouldn't they maintain full credit?

Jay, you've said nothing here that many haven't said before.

You mentioned your team ran motors beyond the scope of the competition. This sort of stuff can hurt the competition, and we're in a place with EV particularly where cost structures don't fully capture performance differentials in components used. That's no surprise, the field is moving quickly. It it gets away from the organisers, we can end up with performance differences not able to be met readily or fairly in better design. The rules exist to provide a template for compromise; it simply needs to be fair and relevant in doing so.

In my year it was a steering rack, believe it or not.

MCoach

01-29-2015, 01:07 PM

I haven't been back to this thread in a bit, but it seems the conversational train has taken the path of arguing for/against high value/ill-represented components and production numbers in FSAE competitions and building to the 'intent' of the rules.

The intent has been stated, is mentioned at every single competition, is on the home page, in the rules, etc: teach these kids how to learn how to run a project and how the real world works.

Aside from this, points are allocated to different categories to ensure that the students become aware that there are compromises. The students, who take it as 'this is a competition, and we can teach ourselves how to best manage our internal and external relations to produce that thing that needs to win competition as dictated by the rules'. Goes for all SAE competitions.

Between the various SAE competitions (not sure if it applies outside of this) cost and the static events have such a low impact on the overall outcome of the competition. When teams start to abandon the cost event because it's more worthwhile to make that thing do whatever it's supposed to do even better for, what some people claim is, an uncompromised solution, some people throw fits. "Hey, you're supposed to work within the intent of our rules! You're supposed to compromise your solution."

Well, if that is someone's argument, then someone needs to restructure the rules or point allocations. I recognize that on the cost report that Swiftus and his team built a car which costs almost 2.5x that of my team's car I understand that we're both working within the constraints of our own finances and product development ability with slightly different goals, but continuing for demonstration sake... 2.5x!!! That's the difference between a production Malibu and Corvette! Where does that get us with a simple subjective points analysis?

Hm...let me do the math...yep...carry the one...uh huh. I see. About 30 points out of 1000 at Michigan was the gap in cost between first in cost and first overall for cost scoring. Other competitions like FSG actually benefit a GFR style car because of the difference in scoring.

So, we've seen the demonstration of dumping all comforts of exotic materials and high dollar components including aerodynamic devices, it doesn't get you very far. However, good design coupled with good management and better materials is something I would trade the rest of the program for based on the current rule set. To continue, presentation shouldn't be that difficult to sell a top 5 car. Someone always wants to be the best, and if they can buy it, less work on them, just justify how you're going to get an Arabian prince or oil tycoon in the car, justified. (Not saying it's easy, just that there's a market).

On track performance? If you can run your car fast enough, the amount that is gapped on other competitors more than makes up for the cost deficit of ~30 points max.

Fuel efficiency? Well, if you are able to gap those who do well on fuel economy by far enough, then you can actually come out on top again. So, no deficit for building a 40hp - max hp engine/motor, sacrificing fuel efficiency for going faster. Even assuming that a GFR style car or an AMZ style car scored 0 in fuel efficiency, there were still cases where it wouldn't have mattered and they'd still be 1st.

Essentially, if you can outdrive the rest of the competition as those typically on the podium have done (top 3-5), then the rest of the competition becomes simple. compromise competition report cost and fuel efficiency to have the fastest car on the grid because that's what the current rules dictate based on points allocation. If that's not the intent, then maybe it's time to change the intent or change the point balance.

Jay, you mention the Baja car being quicker than 1/2 the field. You'd be surprised at how many parts we share between our Formula and Baja cars. ;)

GTS

01-29-2015, 02:49 PM

Jay,

Cost tables are due for some revision where they don't actually ensure parity.

I've no problem arguing scale costs at a supplier end, I'm suggesting that we're not actually getting parity at our end.

FSAE rules (US derivative set) places a limit at 1k/year production. That's pretty tight for automotive production - that's boutique levels of production. It's very definitively a curious number for a reason. Your arguments hold up at typically 60k units/year in automotive. Automotive types wrote the rules, so I hope you can understand their intent.

You mention 3D printers - I've no problem with them, they've been part of my day job for 8 years. Some teams have turned up with 3D printed parts at FSAE-A. "And how to you plan to build these at 1,000 units a year?" "Oh, we'd probably buy a few more RepRaps". It doesn't quite work that way. This is an area where our intent doesn't match our cost rules. Again: time to revise. No biggie. This happens all the time. A few of us at FSAE-A had a small fit with the state of the EV competition as the barriers to entry are still too big - those of us arguing are all ex-EV industry.

Jay, we are not talking at different ends, and MCoach I agree - it is, potentially - time to revise points allocation, as it's too easy to move away from the competition's original intent to one of simply making a fast car.

JulianH

01-29-2015, 06:18 PM

it is, potentially - time to revise points allocation, as it's too easy to move away from the competition's original intent to one of simply making a fast car.

I think this is the pure essence of all these discussions!

Discussing "what is in the intent of the rules" and "what isn't" is very exhausting and random. We have to make "the car that fits the intent of the competition best, wins the competition" the ultimate solution.

In the last years (my competitions were from 2010 to 2013) for us, the "engineering desicion" always was: "Let's build the car that gets the most points and wins. How we get the points is secondary."
We never cared about "ah this is maybe not good for an week-end racer". So therefore, yeah maybe broke the intent of the competition in order to win the competition.
I know that several people disagree with this logic (Sam Collins, the editor from Racecar Engineering and Judge in the UK for example) but that was our approach and it was successful -for what we wanted to be successful-.

If the "FSAE community" (and hereby I mean "us" the interessted alumni and the rules commitee and everybody around this) want to change this "school of thought" by the top teams, then yes: Changing the point allocation and thereby shifting the points distribution towards cost efficient designs, we should do that. And not just pointing fingers and shouting "that's unethical, you rich -what ever curse word- steal the competition" if a team sweeps a competition with an expensive car.

So maybe we should add that to the agenda of the "FSAE Vatican Council" and then figure out the aspects on how to "bring the competition back to its intent".

tromoly

01-29-2015, 06:34 PM

Moke

01-29-2015, 09:46 PM

Been following the thread and was wondering about adding in a few non-engineers to the design event. My thinking behind this is for a vehicle that's marketed for the "weekend non-professional" racer, having the best aero package and carbon fiber-everything won't do any good if the vehicle isn't able to be repaired during an event (please note none of that is directed at any team, just a gross exaggeration). So bring in a few racecar mechanics, autocross racers, hillclimbers, etc. who have experience servicing racing vehicles and will look at things differently than an engineer.

This is not a bad idea, however getting the right weekend racer would be hard. Let me explain:

The problem is in whole the concept and vision of the weekend non-professional racer buying these cars is flawed. If they are as non-professional/unskilled/middle class middle management wage slave as we are lead to believe, would they be buying a low volume single use single seat car only for autocross races or would they use a production car like a MX5 with off the shelf tune up parts? I think we often don't give our "buyers" enough credit for their skills. Especially when they would have driven to the track in a car full of wiz bang acronyms like ABS, ESP, PDA, LOL etc, why can't their "race car" have trick parts too.

I would often argue with people that a composite chassis is no harder, and some times easier, to repair than a steel tube and generally ends up stronger. Both have a minimum required set of skills be it welding or laminating, both have surface prep. Both need some equipment however a for a tube frame it's a welder costing $100's to $1000's, for composite a repair kit like this one for $50ish http://www.carbonmods.co.uk/products/carbon-fibre-repair-kit.aspx. Untrained people are using these kits at home all the time to fix boats, so why couldn't a racer?

Where I am in Auckland, New Zealand we have a lot of boat builder, thus a lot of composite resources and thanks in part to free trade agreements cheap carbon as I mentioned before. Making a composite production car makes sense given our skills and resources. We don't however have alot in the way of fast CNC machines or laser sintering outside of research groups. So when we went to FSG and were asked in cost why our machining took so long or why we didn't sinter parts we had to reply that we simply couldn't in our country. Conversely I know that for some reason carbon fibre is very expensive in Australia, to the point it is cheaper to buy it from NZ.

(Man, I know what the point of my ramble is meant to but I can't think how to word it right. So bear with me....)

Not only do different unis have different resources but moving to the fictional mass production phase different countries have different resources/strengths. So a design to one group might be cost effective, but to another it is seen as a expensive design. This makes a single cost marking schedule and dollar values hard to implement. I do like the "explain why what would be the changes between prototype and production?" and "explain manufacturing in your region?". Having to explain the way you have considered cost reduction is also a good idea.

There used to be the rumour of the team that costed their ECU by opening it up and pricing it resistor by resistor. The cost report part of the event is too easy to cheat and too labour intensive for both the teams and the judges for the number of points on offer.

sekl

01-29-2015, 11:04 PM

I completely agree with Julian.

It seems like there is disagreement about the scoring formulas representing what a "weekend racer" would like. I agree that this is likely not the case, I do not see this as a problem, whatsoever.

No matter whom´s interests the scoring formulas represent, the engineering design goal is to win most points overall at the competition and main influence will be dynamics and cost score. With this being clear, I can setup tools to validate my design decisions - like a lap time simulation that results in competition points. I recently posted a plot of the FSE endurance/efficiency scoring formulas (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_NUx6H8WVRyeFJmMm50UGdJWW8&authuser=0), things like that I can base a design on, it is the best I know about what a weekend racer wants, because it is what the rules tell me.

So, my baseline is clear, any decision should lead to more points in dynamic events + cost score. And, last but not least, I need to document what I do and how I take my decisions, to defend my design in DE.

But, as we all know, it is not quite that easy. Despite limited experience, it is normally money and time that will be the limiting factors. To me, this was and is one of the great things about FSAE, there is no hard limit and others have shown before, almost anything can be done. If I can design it and find a sponsor, I can build whatever I can justify with more points, using the tools I got available to backup my decision.

If I got good engineering, I also need good marketing to not be at the resource limit right away...

--> FSAE is not "just" an engineering design competition, it needs many things around the engineering to be successful. Ultimately, you are limited by "real world resources" which are not directly related to how good of an engineer you are. To me, that´s a big part of what makes FSAE so great.

_________
------------

Now, what does all that mean specifically for the DE? In my opinion, to judge about engineering, the product really is of minor importance - because it will be limited by real world resources, not by what engineering could do if there was no limit. Big Bird mentioned it some pages back, maybe you need to "zoom out a bit".

Why not step further back up the process and have judging teams based on the design process:
Problem framing
Concept development and selection
Analysis and validation
Manufacturing and delivery
Performance

If all judges follow the same logic, accepting that a high score in dynamics and cost is the overall design goal and the limit is real world resources, things seem not so complicating to me anymore. The rest is about how well a team / student can make the judge believe that what was build (or not build), was the best use of available resources to maximize points (and that reasonable effort was invested to explore new resources).

At the end, any team can reach a reasonable score in DE, however, due to real world resource limitations, dynamic event score might not be enough to win the competition. A thing that can help to get around this, might be an iterative design approach... As long as you can justify why you did not change a part - because there was another one that gave more points / resource invested - this should not hurt DE score, but improve performance in dynamics - assuming there is no judge that got other expectations what FSAE is about, which you can´t know about before the event, making it irrelevant for the design process.

The whole "weekend racer" aspect is in my opinion only relevant for the business presentation. For DE, only the numbers resulting from the scoring formulas are relevant, as only those represent preferences of the fictional "weekend racer (or someone else, I don´t care)" in a measurable way.

MCoach

01-30-2015, 12:04 AM

Just to clarify, I wasn't attacking our Oregon State/ DHBW friends over here. :)

To back up Moke, there's a guy here in Michigan I've run against whose got a really fast A Mod car. Composites? I don't see a problem with them being on the cars and this guy is one of my favorite examples of a weekend autocrosser.
I asked him about his wings last time I saw him and he told me that he called up Simon McBeath, said he runs an autocross car, drag doesn't matter, send the biggest wings that fit his package. He shelled out a few thousand dollars and wings showed up on his door step. He bolted them on and went racing. Didn't even think twice about the price.

It's an autocross car. Assuming the mounts are strong enough, what do you expect to hit? There shouldn't be that much in the way of repair.

Here's he and his ridiculous car:
http://www.tunersgroup.com/images/large/large2225.jpg

I also completely agree with sekl. The rules dictate how the customer is (in very complicated way) weighting what they want in a car. How much do they value speed over cost? How much do they care about how much fuel it burns. This is shown in the points that are presented to us and how much we get. The more points, the more likely they are to buy the car. Seems reasonable.

GTS

01-30-2015, 12:15 AM

Discussing "what is in the intent of the rules" and "what isn't" is very exhausting and random. We have to make "the car that fits the intent of the competition best, wins the competition" the ultimate solution.

Correct.

In the last years (my competitions were from 2010 to 2013) for us, the "engineering desicion" always was: "Let's build the car that gets the most points and wins. How we get the points is secondary."
We never cared about "ah this is maybe not good for an week-end racer". So therefore, yeah maybe broke the intent of the competition in order to win the competition.
I know that several people disagree with this logic (Sam Collins, the editor from Racecar Engineering and Judge in the UK for example) but that was our approach and it was successful -for what we wanted to be successful.

And this will happen from time to time, and rules need to be adjusted to reflect this.

Aerodynamics is a great example. Rules were adjusted to promote new thought. Now they need to be adjusted... to promote new thought (among other reasons).

If the "FSAE community" (and hereby I mean "us" the interessted alumni and the rules commitee and everybody around this) want to change this "school of thought" by the top teams, then yes: Changing the point allocation and thereby shifting the points distribution towards cost efficient designs, we should do that. And not just pointing fingers and shouting "that's unethical, you rich -what ever curse word- steal the competition" if a team sweeps a competition with an expensive car.

So maybe we should add that to the agenda of the "FSAE Vatican Council" and then figure out the aspects on how to "bring the competition back to its intent".

I don't want to keep on nailing the point with unobtanium, Julian, run whatever you can cost though organizers need to be mindful that 'unobtanium' needs to be something that other competitors would readily have access to, and that is broadly accounted for in rules in terms of what compromises including it in a design should bring.

Join in via Skype if you will.

sekl;

No one doubts that maximising points wins competitions. It's not that that's being argued, it's whether the points structure actually reflects the intent of the competition. There's a gap here and this is what's being discussed.

No, students and faculty cannot be held to ransom for skirting the intent of the rules but being within the legality of them. Rules can be made better, and interested stakeholders can be reflective about what they're seeking from their involvement. I would stress - as a former educator - that winning really isn't everything. The intent is what it is with good reason.

I've no issues with teams using what they can explain whether last year or last decade's part or a bold new italic. In the interests of equality, I've a personal interest in seeing a change log year to year (easier for judges, formalises knowledge transfer to a degree for students) and in limiting competing teams sharing design work, because the application of it at FSAE-A in 2013 was particularly saddening from both an educational and competitive point-of-view. That's just me.

I don't agree with your assertion that the competition should be resource limited. There are student project-based learning competitions that cater to that - FSAE was never intended to be as much - and frankly the majority of FSAE cars aren't the last word in overall performance. Take this as you will - I appreciate many will disagree with it vehemently - though I'd suggest a reality check relative to why we're here, and embrace the notion that there are significant performance gaps even in top running cars. This is simply because students are themselves resource-constrained (in needing to be... students) and because students don't actually know everything there is to know about designing a car to the brief intended. Neither is a cardinal sin. The "brown go kart" argument is especially valid - there's the possibility to build cars of phenomenal performance compared to what's currently in the competition, though these are about as beyond-scope as suggesting that organisers should be comfortable with resource limitations being significant determinants of performance. FSAE is very deliberately a student competition where the design brief well exceeds the available resources to complete it. We should not seek to entertain additional disparities beyond this, no matter how possible they may or may not be.

This

The whole "weekend racer" aspect is in my opinion only relevant for the business presentation.

Not correct. If rules don't match intent, we need to change one or both.

Big Bird

01-30-2015, 10:22 AM

I hope the below makes sense...

When a competition, or ruleset is new, there is little "prior art" to refer to and competitors are forced to assess the event from first principles (or synthesize ideas from similar comps). A new competition attracts more "first principles" analyses and solutions. "Zoom out" perspective, as sekl so eloquently put it.

When a competition matures and there is a greater volume of info known about how to be successful, it becomes easier to reach the top through anecdotal knowledge, copying, legacy designs etc. Also, once a known successful concept exists, separation between the teams tends to come from refinement. "Zoom in" perspective takes over. And once popular opinion zooms in on a successful solution, focus turns to detail differences - and this is when we start to "need" electropnuematically spark eroded titanium fibre Schrader valves.

Now unis already do "zoom in". They have whole sweatshops of PhD students focussing on microcrystalline structures of welds and vortex shedding from side door trims. What they fail to do well is teach "zoom out". Most lecturers at uni are zoom in types and really struggle with open design tasks. FSAE was initially conceived because grads weren't work ready. It wouldn't exist if it were not different from uni.

So I think more "zoom out" is needed. Change points allocations. Change track layouts and average speeds. Change the event. Put it on dirt - speedway one year, mx track the next, beach race the next, mud run the next. OK, so maybe I am being a bit too fanciful and "blue sky" here. But as soon as teams start to think of themselves as "aero teams" or "single cylinder teams" or "carbon tub teams", you know the event is at a stagnation point. Teams are more about protecting and delivering their own solution than they are about working through design process. Keep teams guessing about the best concept - and first principle analysis will follow.

MCoach

01-30-2015, 12:04 PM

"Zoom out" engineering (oh boy, we're coining our own terms here now) is emphasized in another competition series that I participated in during high school. FIRST Robotics and their associated leagues host yearly regional competitions where several thousand teams compete. Every year the game is different. The game pieces may change from year to year, the goals of movement may change, the ground surface may change, etc. How points are allocated also changes every year. There is always bonus points for the game and teams have to analyze whether it is worth attempting to go after those with their design concept. The game is revealed in January and the robot must be crated and post marked by some 6 weeks later. Design and build seasons tend to happen simultaneously to be able to accomplish the goals in that condensed time scale. Teams are supported by volunteers that are able ro teach but not design it for them.

Its relevant and echos your proposal, however I'm not sure how it could be carried out on FSAE level. A dirt track year would put the competition on its head for some people but I would guarantee that you still see SAE or research papers pop up like "race rubber to Eldora Speedway surface interaction".

Big Bird

01-30-2015, 09:18 PM

MCoach, we have the same sort of thing down here, called the Warman Design and Build comp. It is exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote my post.

You don't need to completely change everything though to give things a good shake up. Remember Ferrari's dominance in F1, after years of stagnant rules? Remember how they had squillions of dollars and fancy wind tunnels and a huge workforce to keep ahead of the comp. Then with a major change in rules suddenly it is a small budget
team with a big picture leader that comes out on top (Brawn F1). There is probably a lot more behind it than that - but I thought it was interesting nonetheless

sekl

01-31-2015, 06:17 PM

GTS,

my post was actually about the DE, not about FSAE as a project. I was trying to circle Julian´s post back to DE and how you can judge a design process as long as students and judges are on the same page about FSAE being a competition and the goal being to win most points. Try to keep the thread title in mind when reading my posts, please.

No one doubts that maximising points wins competitions. It's not that that's being argued, it's whether the points structure actually reflects the intent of the competition. There's a gap here and this is what's being discussed.

To repeat my first sentence...
It seems like there is disagreement about the scoring formulas representing what a "weekend racer" would like. I agree that this is likely not the case, I do not see this as a problem, whatsoever.

What followed was, why I think it is not a problem for DE if formulas and "intention in words" do not match, as long as design judges agree to focus on numbers and forget the "intention".

No, students and faculty cannot be held to ransom for skirting the intent of the rules but being within the legality of them. Rules can be made better, and interested stakeholders can be reflective about what they're seeking from their involvement. I would stress - as a former educator - that winning really isn't everything. The intent is what it is with good reason.

I am not member of any faculty and won´t discuss its position in FSAE as I do not see me in the position to do so. As a student, education was not something I did care about, it was a side effect of FSAE, a competition I was interested to win, simple.

What intent are you talking about, the one in(between) the words or the one in numbers (scoring formulas)? There is no metric to measure how well a design is meeting the intent of the competition as a whole, it is not a valid engineering design goal to me and therefore irrelevant for design process and DE.

I don't agree with your assertion that the competition should be resource limited. There are student project-based learning competitions that cater to that - FSAE was never intended to be as much - and frankly the majority of FSAE cars aren't the last word in overall performance.

I did not say the competition should be resource limited, however, from my experience, it is. Also I said, I like that there is no artificial resource limit by the rules. I am not sure, but are you suggesting an artificial limitation of resources by the rules? Which resource would you want to limit and how would that benefit DE?

Take this as you will - I appreciate many will disagree with it vehemently - though I'd suggest a reality check relative to why we're here, and embrace the notion that there are significant performance gaps even in top running cars. This is simply because students are themselves resource-constrained (in needing to be... students) and because students don't actually know everything there is to know about designing a car to the brief intended. Neither is a cardinal sin. The "brown go kart" argument is especially valid - there's the possibility to build cars of phenomenal performance compared to what's currently in the competition,

I´m OK with not all of us being here for the same reason. Not sure what you are trying to make me think about. I have no direct interest in teams building a vehicle for maximum performance physically possible, it is not needed to win the competition and therefore the wrong design goal to defend in DE. (Not saying good dynamic performance is not a good thing, just saying it is not everything it takes to win competition and therefore not the overall goal to me. This seems easy to misinterpret, hope it´s somewhat clear...)

I understand you saying, that teams do not see the potential to improve performance at lower cost than what is seen at competition at the moment. I understand that you are not satisfied with this from an educators perspective. However, from an engineers perspective, I do not see it as much of a problem, just take it as a thought. If you read my post again, you will notice that I did mention knowledge as a resource limitation, it sounds like you forget that it is/might be the toughest one to maintain and constantly extend in FSAE though.

... though these are about as beyond-scope as suggesting that organisers should be comfortable with resource limitations being significant determinants of performance. FSAE is very deliberately a student competition where the design brief well exceeds the available resources to complete it. We should not seek to entertain additional disparities beyond this, no matter how possible they may or may not be.

So we do agree that FSAE is resource limited and you just don´t agree how some teams extend their resources on other fields than knowledge, so you want to artificially limit something to hold those teams back. No idea why that would help anyone with respect to DE or anything else. If you believe a student with more constraints on what resources he is allowed to use will learn more, I don´t.

Quote Originally Posted by sekl View Post
The whole "weekend racer" aspect is in my opinion only relevant for the business presentation.
Not correct. If rules don't match intent, we need to change one or both.

If you quote my words, quote the full paragraph. I suggest you read it again. Also, you may disagree, but do not tell me what my opinion is. My point is, change one or the other, to me that does not change anything related to DE, if the design process is judged, the design goal stays the same - maximize points by using available resources as good as possible

Now, take it as you want and respect that not everyone involved here is "an educator". FSAE is not only about education - as you mentioned yourself, the event itself is actually not at all about it, so why should the rules aim for maximum educational impact of FSAE as a project and not leave it to the universities.

BB, MCach,

I was talking about asking other questions during DE, I hope it was clear that what I was talking about was far away from the latest ideas here.
I think the idea of frequent, drastic rules changes is not good. It sounds like you would like to give each team, each season, the full design cycle. I can understand the idea, however, I would expect the performance and reliability at the competition to drop, making it less attractive for everyone. If you really keep it with "small" changes, I might be open for the idea more, however, those who want dirt on track may go to Baja. I think a change that would require design choice validation tools to drastically change (which is the only way to force a team to go back to start I think) is not feasible. Taking the "intention in words" to backup my argument, no company would change its target market once a year. I imagine it as effectively an artificial limitation in knowledge management, which I do not think is a benefit to anyone.

GTS

01-31-2015, 07:22 PM

GTS,
my post was actually about the DE, not about FSAE as a project. I was trying to circle Julian´s post back to DE and how you can judge a design process as long as students and judges are on the same page about FSAE being a competition and the goal being to win most points. Try to keep the thread title in mind when reading my posts, please.

Ease up, tiger. Having suggested this thread be created, I'm well aware of the thread title.

Design is core to the FSAE activity. Getting DE right is particularly important.

It seems like there is disagreement about the scoring formulas representing what a "weekend racer" would like. I agree that this is likely not the case, I do not see this as a problem, whatsoever.

I get what you're suggesting here, however there are many - myself included - that are concerned that the scoring formula does not currently reflect a 'weekend racer'.

What followed was, why I think it is not a problem for DE if formulas and "intention in words" do not match, as long as design judges agree to focus on numbers and forget the "intention".

On the day there is little other to focus on, as we are there to judge/be judged by the rules as agreed. This debate, however, is about exploring changing the rules.

There are always going to be ingenious attempts to subvert or otherwise reinterpret the rules, for which rules need to evolve. This isn't new.

What intent are you talking about, the one in(between) the words or the one in numbers (scoring formulas)? There is no metric to measure how well a design is meeting the intent of the competition as a whole, it is not a valid engineering design goal to me and therefore irrelevant for design process and DE.

Words. There is no direct link between points and worded competition intent, and this is a problem. What is closest in terms of indirect links is probably cost event, which requires some significant revision as it presently allows solutions considerably beyond the intent of the competition.

As a student or person engaged in meeting the competition intent, if you are playing to win it's understandable to assess the point allocation and work accordingly. This doesn't mean that students' best attempts are actually good ones (resources asides), and a part of the organisers' responsibility is to ensure that what frames the competition - wordings, rules and the like - actually guide students towards better solutions.

The competition was however formed as an industry parallel and as a design brief for a contracted projected in industry, what's worded is a completely relevant design brief. Most design briefs don't come with a rule set aping FSAE, and accordingly, to make a set of rules to have competitive efforts judged in a student context is a unique-to-FSAE challenge.

I did not say the competition should be resource limited, however, from my experience, it is. Also I said, I like that there is no artificial resource limit by the rules. I am not sure, but are you suggesting an artificial limitation of resources by the rules? Which resource would you want to limit and how would that benefit DE?

The organisers of course wish to have teams competing as equitably as possible. It is impossible to ensure absolute parity; different universities have different core competencies, different equipment, different student numbers, different faculty experience, different course structures and learning methods (let alone sponsors, funding etc). It is impossible to ensure absolute parity in resource allocation. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make it easier for all to compete. First-year teams are having a very hard time, and locally (Australia) we are about to enter a period of significantly disparate funding; this is very important here.

From a DJ perspective it'd be good to see students pushed more towards a first-principles understanding of their projects as opposed to an industrial one; a greater number of students simply don't understand what's on their cars. Simple. If it takes a simpler project to enable this, so be it.

If you are seeking direct correlations of resource limitations to better DE you won't get it. These are broadly indirect arguments, but their intent is no less valid.

I understand you saying, that teams do not see the potential to improve performance at lower cost than what is seen at competition at the moment. I understand that you are not satisfied with this from an educators perspective. However, from an engineers perspective, I do not see it as much of a problem, just take it as a thought.

If FSAE was an engineering project, that'd be fine - however it's an educational project.

So we do agree that FSAE is resource limited and you just don´t agree how some teams extend their resources on other fields than knowledge, so you want to artificially limit something to hold those teams back. No idea why that would help anyone with respect to DE or anything else. If you believe a student with more constraints on what resources he is allowed to use will learn more, I don´t.

You've misunderstood this much.

FSAE is intended to exceed student resources in knowledge and time. No undergraduate student team is experienced enough to build a perfect car, nor is any team expected to arrive at competition reporting that they'd time for everything they wanted to do. The onus on students is very intentionally to make smart choices with regards to finite time and knowledge gaps. As judges we do not expect perfection, we look for relatively better approaches.

We have witnessed the industrialisation of a good bit of FSAE in disparate ways.

Not all of this is bad: e.g. when I started FSAE we used to use bicycle shock absorbers, today spec parts exist. These aren't bad, they in fact allow students to do some real and very relevant work in vehicle dynamic development.

Some of it can be a limiting; EVs for instance: we don't expect students to make their own cells, however disparate levels of access to competitive cells makes for a disparate competition with no learning advantage whatsoever. These are not parts that are always easy to source; in some applications they are not yet commodified.

Some of it is frankly just saddening. In Australia we've seen some universities swapping complete CAD sets, having them run on other teams' cars. There's nothing in rules limiting this, of course, however there's no net benefit when those inheriting the work can't actually explain it (in context or otherwise) - worse when relevant faculty endorse this specifically to evade relevant design challenges. This creates a learning disparity.

A student/engineer/designer with more constraints on what they're allowed to use is simply forced to make better use of what they have, which learnings inherent through the design process. Resource efficiency is a metric common to almost any engineering project. I disagree with your notion that a student with resources constraints will not learn more.

By the same token no one wants to limit resource creativity, as there's much to learn therein too.

This is a discussion on how things can be made better, so please don't misconstrue it to suggest that things are chronically broken. "Better" is a continuum and I'd hope people from all perspectives want to contribute, rather than debate a need otherwise. Neither can rule adjustments account for all progress that's possible to this end, with rules we can only set limits: what can be done, what can't be done and to what degree. There is much to be done - I'd suggest a lot that's underdone in FSAE - from collaborative community efforts among students, event organisers, sponsors and the like: there's been talk of more amenable resources for EV entrants down here, common safety training, common code repositories, resources to aid open-sourcing of design work, unified sponsor shops for certain resources and the like. The competition must always move forwards and we are all as a community stakeholders to this end.

It comes back to DE as we wish to have conversations with students where the only limits are what what is or isn't in their heads regards the quality of their design work.

If you quote my words, quote the full paragraph. I suggest you read it again. Also, you may disagree, but do not tell me what my opinion is.

Chill out. Your paragraph was read fully the first time, nor is anyone attempting to ram a fresh opinion down your throat.

That you, me or anyone else should be having an opinion on where the intent of the competition is actually reflected in the rules is a very real problem. As stated - we either need to close the gap or eliminate the discussion that leads to it. It shouldn't exist.

sekl

01-31-2015, 09:01 PM

GTS,

I did not mean to offend you. I tried to imply, that I feel, that the thread is off topic. I understand now, we got a different perspective on DE in FSAE. It actually was my favorite event, however, it was not the one I felt most important and this is still the case.

As I mentioned before, I personally do not think it is important, for the engineering part of FSAE, what kind of weekend racer the formulas describe, as long as there is no expectation that a design meets something the formulas do not cover. Tweaking formulas for whatever reason at a specific competition is certainly a possibility to be considered, changing a formula for dynamics or cost event should however have little impact on DE in my opinion. I can not follow your indirect path to it, not saying it is not there though.

FSAE is an engineering competition to me (not even essentially a DESIGN competition, project and process management is just as important as design, I believe), this should make up for a lot of the different perspective we got.

I am not familiar with the sharing situation at FSAE-A. I agree that the situation does not sound desirable.

The open-source approach is interesting, but I am not very decided on it. You seem to be concerned about electronics mainly (which I heard from others being seen as a hurdle for new EV teams, too), but how is electronics really different from mechanics? You just need another student to work on it - consider it in recruiting and project management. It is not a task that can´t be managed by a first year team to build a rules compliant system I believe, there is nearly not any discussion about EVs in this forum too, so it seems not the main concern for most teams.

I do not believe things are chronically broken and I do not want to say they can not be always improved. However, I do not see need to change the rules, speaking from my experience that does not include having been to FSAE-A. It was not clear to me that the focus of the thread changed to how to change the rules.

I agree with you, that a student I do not allow to use integrated circuits will learn more about discrete transistors, however, I disagree that he in general learns more, he just learns other things.

As mentioned before, I actually do not think a gap in intention in words vs. scoring formulas is essentially a problem for DE. I think, as long as there´s no metric to measure an intention, it is subjective thing and if you close the gap for you, it opens for someone else.