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PH OTO : E l e n a S o b o l eva
Do you have a need for speed? Since 2017, Team Phantom has been designing fully-operational electric vehicles for racing competitions. The club was started by students majoring in mechatronics at SFU — a branch of engineering specialized in mechanical, electrical, and electronic elements of building. The club originally started out building electric go-karts but switched to assembling electric cars from scratch. The team enters their car into electric competitions hosted by the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), who also put on other competitions as part of their Collegiate Design Series. The Peak spoke with operations director and mechatronic SFU student Alex Cherniavskii about how the club strives to make their cars as sustainable as possible. Since the cars run on electricity and don’t produce any emissions, they are “cleaner than a traditional combustion-engine.” This helps the team demonstrate that crafting smaller scale electrical vehicles is practical, and helps prospective engineers build the skills necessary to pursue a career in sustainability.
It will be our responsibility to ensure that we do things to ensure the integrity of our future as a collective of people that live on this planet. Alex Cherniavskii operations director and mechatronic student
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“We already have club alumni that started their own cleantech company, Moment Energy, and we have both current and past club members currently working at industry-leading electric transportation and energy companies,” said Cherniavskii, who currently works as an intern for Tesla. As the next generation of engineers, Team Phantom is mindful of what they can do during their projects to limit emissions. “It will be our responsibility to ensure that we do things to ensure the integrity of our future as a collective of people that live on this planet [ . . . ] We all know what’s coming, so it is our job to recognize that we can apply ourselves to improve the outcome as much as we can.” Part of using greener building methods also means picking and choosing when to use resources. Instead of competing annually, Team Phantom participates in races every other year. In order to design a car from the ground up to race every two years, Team Phantom is split into four sub-team — controls, dynamics, frame/ aero, and power — and a business team to seek out sponsorships to make their cars. The control team is the driver’s right-hand man. They build the communication system the driver uses to remain in control of the vehicle at all times. The dynamics team is the car’s eyes and ears.
