Hokie Electric Vehicle Team prepares students for industry through hands-on experience

It's got a slide for it. So we are HEVC. It's a four-year design competition with three headline sponsors. The US Department of Energy, General Motors and math works. And we've got six main goals. So we're trying to incorporate advanced propulsion systems, connected automated vehicle systems. And then we're increasing efficiency, safety, and consumer appeal. While on the social side, reaching out, there isn't addressing equity and mobility. One of our big sponsors is General Motors. So they're kind of developing this competition and trying to prepare students for industry. Some of the stuff we do is stuff that they worked on currently. A lot of this stuff before. We're just looking to replicate it. The angle for the connected automated vehicles team is to develop a SEA level two plus autonomous vehicle. So that includes adaptive cruise control, plane keep assist. Some of the features we see on cars on the market now. But then we'll also include things like automatic intersection navigation, automatic and parking. Basically, the goal is to have automatic navigation for city driving and driving. In previous competitions, we've been taking internal combustion cars and turning them into hybrid vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. We've been doing this for about, this is our 29th year of competition. Is this competition. We're actually getting an electric vehicle that has little to autonomy. And we're turning it into electric vehicle with level two autonomy. So a lot of what is unique about IGBT is that it's meant to simulate the actual vehicle development process as if you were working at a regular OEM manufacturer. And so it's really, really good at is getting us hands-on experience, basically setting us up for industry. The people that we talked to our industry sponsors say that we started about two years ahead of our contemporaries as our graduating because of the experience that we're able to gain through HEVC.