USU Baja SAE Returns Successful in Oregon Tournament

Utah State University’s Baja SAE chapter returned to Cache Valley having achieved their best result in recent history at an annual off-road vehicle engineering competition.

Their scores put them in 18th position overall out of 86 teams at this year’s Baja SAE competition in Oregon. The team worked on increasing the durability of the car to improve performance in the endurance event, which is the main event at the competition. Forty percent of points come from that single event.

“This is a big deal for our team,” said Jackson Graham, the club adviser for Baja SAE. “We placed 25th in the hill climb event, 26th in maneuverability, 11th in the rock crawl, and 13th in the endurance event. We improved significantly from last year when we only placed 29th in endurance event at Tennessee Tech.”

Baja SAE, hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers, consists of competitions that simulate real-world engineering design projects and their related challenges. Engineering students are tasked to design and build an off-road vehicle that will survive the severe punishment of rough terrain. Each team's goal is to design and build a single-seat, all-terrain, sporting vehicle whose structure contains the driver. The vehicle is to be a prototype for a reliable, maintainable, ergonomic and economical production vehicle that serves a recreational user market.

At last year’s event at Tennessee Tech, USU placed 26th overall out of 85 schools.

Teams compete against one another to have their design accepted for manufacture by a fictitious firm. Students must function as a team to not only design, build, test, promote and race a vehicle within the limits of the rules, but also to generate financial support for their project and manage their educational priorities.

All vehicles are powered by an unmodified 14-horsepower Kohler Command Pro CH440 engine for competition testing. This is to regulate power output of the engines and ensure a level playing field. Use of the same engine by all teams creates a more challenging engineering design test.