Student Engineering Team Builds Custom Off Road Vehicle for National Competitions
Northeastern University’s Baja SAE student club designs and builds a custom off-road vehicle from scratch each year to test its performance in grueling multi-day national engineering competitions.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Joshua Luce, a fourth-year mechanical engineering major and new member manager, works under the chassis of the Baja SAE off-road vehicle. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
This Northeastern club doesn’t shy away from a bumpy ride
Northeastern Baja SAE has a simple goal at the start of each year — build a brand new off-road vehicle from scratch and take it to competition.
After securely putting on a helmet and harness, Eleanor Johnson had just moments to mentally prepare to tackle the many logs, hills, jumps and potholes that lay ahead on the dirt track.
Participating in the Baja SAE competition in Palmyra, New York, Johnson had been called to be the second of three drivers on the Northeastern team competing in the tournament’s grueling four-hour off-road race.
Johnson was excited to put to test the off-road all-terrain vehicle built by the Northeastern Baja SAE student club, whose sole focus is developing and building such machines. But the rising fourth-year mechanical engineering student and co-design lead on the club admitted to having some nerves.
“One second you are standing there, and the next second you’re strapped in the car and told to go,” Johnson said. “It was kind of insane, honestly.”
But it’s those exact experiences members of Northeastern Baja SAE live for.
Founded in 1985 in coordination with the global Society of Automotive Engineers, Northeastern Baja SAE has a simple goal at the start of each year — build a brand new off-road vehicle from scratch and take it to competition. The name Baja comes from the famous off-road desert races held on Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula.
The students compete in three SAE Baja competitions in the U.S. each year — one in the west coast in the spring; one in the east coast in the summer; and one in the midwest in the fall.
Building a car from the ground up every year, and one that is capable of competing, is far from an easy undertaking, team members explained. But the student team has done it consistently for years.
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Northeastern Baja SAE club members work on the off-road vehicle in the COE Makerspace in Richards Hall. Photos by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
The club is in the process of building its 27th model, explained Theordore Lourie, a rising fourth-year student majoring in electrical engineering and music technology and one of the co-design leads on the team.
Planning typically starts in the fall but this year, the team started planning this summer to give it more time to prepare for competition, he explained During the first phase, the team comes together to review what went wrong with the previous model and decides what needs changing for the next one.
From there, the team’s various subteams, which focus on chassis, brakes, suspension and drivetrain, spend the fall at work creating initial designs for the latest model and go through various review stages, including receiving direct feedback from the team’s alums, Johnson said.
“Some of them are working at actual automotive companies like Honda,” he said. “They have real-world experience and they can bring that knowledge to us to make sure that we don’t make simple mistakes.”
Real machining and manufacturing begin in the spring and into the early summer.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News