The objectives of our project were to make a functional go kart that has 2 active rear motors that each drive independent rear wheel. We would be able to drive the go kart around the “O” at speeds exceeding 20 miles per hour, while recycling as many components that we can find as possible.

We wanted the car to be able to handle significant cornering loads and handle well, while being able to function safely with a forward and reverse functionality to navigate around campus. We also wanted at least a 10 minutes run time with our batteries and a fairly quick acceleration that we could reach 20 miles per hour within 5 seconds.

Users would be able to safely operate the vehicle with both a mechanical and electrical braking system for redundancy, and easy to use emergency stop function, and to have a fun time in a budget-oriented go-kart that was resurrected from scrap.

We would dissect and re-use a rusted out go kart chassis and weld on our own axle mounts and bearing blocks, create our own brake rotors, guide and tune our braking system and method of brake application to be mechanical using old and discarded moped brake calipers, create our own sprocket to match the found sprocket in terms of gearing and align up with our found motors, have a Battery management system for safety, and make our own battery in house with enough power and capacity to meet our performance goals.

Energy Flows Model

High level overview of Go Kart design.

System Diagram