EcoCAR 2: Plugging In to the Future (EcoCAR) is North America's premier collegiate automotive engineering competition, challenging students with systems-level advanced powertrain design and integration. The three-year Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTC) series is organized by Argonne National Laboratory, headline sponsored by the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and General Motors (GM), and sponsored by more than 28 industry and government leaders. Fifteen university teams from across North America are challenged to reduce the environmental impact of a 2013 Chevrolet Malibu by redesigning the vehicle powertrain without compromising performance, safety, or consumer acceptability.
During the three-year program, EcoCAR teams follow a real-world Vehicle Development Process (VDP) modeled after GM's own VDP. The VDP serves as a roadmap for the engineering process of designing, building and refining advanced technology vehicles. During the first year of EcoCAR, teams execute a rigorous powertrain architecture selection process to define technical goals and develop a powertrain architecture that would satisfy both team and competition requirements.
This paper gives a detailed overview of the EcoCAR competition and the design activities undertaken during the first year of the competition, while also looking forward to the second and third years. The overall outcomes of the architecture selection process are detailed with a high-level overview of the team-selected architectures and the overall results for the first year of competition. Finally, three team perspectives of the architecture selection process are described, and significant results of the competition architecture selection process are presented.