ITE engineering students build electric-powered kart from scratch

Inspired by a love for cars and the TV show Top Gear, Mr Abdul Razzak, 21, and his four teammates set out to build two electric-powered utility karts for their final-year project.

The team of second-year Institute of Technical Education (ITE) College West students include Mr Shafiq Roslee, 22, Mr Lee Wei Xiong, 25, Mr Muhammad Endry Osman, 21, and Mr Willvin Tan, 21, all of whom are pursuing a technical engineering diploma in automotive engineering.

They unveiled the fruits of their labour at ITE's inaugural automotive conference, which was held last Tuesday .

The team built the two karts from scratch, doing the wiring and welding together of the parts they had designed and outsourced to companies to construct for them.

Mr Muhammad Endry said: "We applied all the things we had learnt in class when carrying out our project."

The environmentally friendly electric vehicles can last seven hours on a single charge. They can reach speeds of up to 55kmh and are designed to be used for offroad driving or for security patrols.

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ITE will be using them as teaching implements.

During the conference, the karts wowed numerous guests from the automotive industry.

Mr Razzak admitted that the process leading up to the showcase was anything but easy.

The team's supervisor, Mr Lim Wei Chuan, believes that their overambition gave them a bit of a bumpy ride.

Mr Lim, who is an ITE lecturer on automotive technology, said they tried to implement too many unnecessary features to make their karts look as rugged as possible.

He said: "I ended up having to turn down some of their ideas, because the budget (of $14,000) couldn't cover the costs, which hampered their progress somewhat."

Despite the hiccups, the team hopes that their juniors can learn from their project and fine-tune it further.

"We are enabling future batches of students to use our model as a base to build upon and improve." said Mr Razzak.