Baja
SAE
The Competition
Baja SAE® 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 economic production vehicle which serves a recreational user market.
- SAE International Website
The Build
The key to the Baja SAE automotive design project is about building a reliable and functional vehicle that can withstand the environment that it is driven in. Once reliability and functionality have been established, then we focus on weight saving, speed, and handling. The engines are selected by the SAE event organizers but the rest of the design is reserved for the capstone students. The use of high quality building materials and replaceable parts enable the team to minimize the time and points lost during various competitions. In the end, our goal is to fabricate a lightweight vehicle that we can throw around an off-road coarse and drive back to our team trailer at the end of the day.