The Ohio State (OSU) & Wilberforce University Team has been named the winner of Year One of the EcoCAR Electric Vehicle (EV) Challenge, taking the lead in the four-year collegiate engineering competition. West Virginia University took second place and University of Alabama finished third in the judged competition, which was held from 21–26 May 2023 in Orlando, Florida.

Managed by Argonne National Laboratory and sponsored by the US Department of Energy (DOE), General Motors, and MathWorks, the EcoCAR EV Challenge is a cross-disciplinary competition among 15 North American universities designed to build an EV talent pipeline through cutting edge automotive engineering education and practical application.

Participating teams are tasked with complex, real-world technical EV challenges, including enhancing the propulsion system of a 2023 Cadillac LYRIQ to optimize energy efficiency while maintaining consumer expectations for performance and driving experience throughout the four-year competition.

Year One of EcoCAR is all about generating big ideas and developing a strategy for the remainder of the competition.

—Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alejandro Moreno

This year, partnership team Ohio State University and Wilberforce University, one of the competition’s two HBCUs, showed consistency in excellence across all subteams throughout Year 1, earning top three finishes for 12 pre-competition deliverables, 10 of which were first-place finishes. They also notched top-3 finishes for their Project Management subteam and their DEI subteam. Overall, the team earned a total of 850 points out of 1000.

The Team’s complex embedded system designs were impressive. We look forward to seeing the teams continue to use MATLAB and Simulink to build and simulate their EV designs throughout the duration of the multi-year competition.

—Lauren Tabolinsky, Global Academic Student Programs Manager at MathWorks

In Year Two of the competition, each student team will receive a Cadillac LYRIQ, a next-generation battery electric vehicle (BEV) provided by GM. Teams will be tasked with reengineering the vehicle to add new energy efficient and customer-friendly features designed to address the decarbonization needs of the automotive industry.