The "Schauinsland Hill Challenge" as part of the ECO Grand Prix is a special kind of racing event: On public roads and of course in compliance with all traffic regulations, the teams had to master a mountain route from Freiburg im Breisgau up to the Schauinsland viewing point within 24 hours on 27 and 28 June 2020. The route is 50 kilometres long and involves climbing 1,000 metres in altitude. The lap has to be repeated as often as possible within the given time, and the electric vehicles have to be driven with low batteries. The vehicles are charged between the rounds. The "Schauinsland Hill Challenge" is a perfect fit for the Information Management Automotive (IMA) course of study, in which the students deal a lot with resource efficiency and electric mobility. Professors Vogt, Gerlach and Plechaty started this year as a private team for testing purposes.
After the racing pleasure it's time to: Evaluate data
In Professor Gerlach's Renault ZOE, an electric car with a small battery that is not really designed for such stresses, the team completed 17 complete laps in 24 hours. This meant class victory in the ZOE class and 7th place in the overall standings. This meant that the HNU team lost surprisingly close compared to the much better equipped cars, especially Tesla: The winning team managed 20 laps with a Tesla Model 3.
After the racing pleasure now comes work. The IMA professors and researchers start to evaluate the collected data: How and where can we become even more efficient, what are the correlations between driven speed, energy consumption and track profile? Which charging strategies are optimal? The aim is to use the analyses and simulations to identify potentials - methods and skills as taught and developed in the IMA course.
"(Racing) team for efficient electric mobility" at the HNU
At the next "Schauinsland Hill Challenge" the HNU team wants to break its own record. Students are also invited to participate. The medium-term goal is to establish an own "(racing) team for efficient electric mobility" at HNU. This is intended to make the topics of resource efficiency and electromobility tangible at HNU. In line with this, students are currently writing their first student research projects on how such racing events can be made even more interesting for spectators through information technology.
